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I have two following linux shell commands:

echo 'CPU type and model'
cat /proc/cpuinfo | head -5 | tail -1

When i run these commands directly in Terminal, i get this result truly:

CPU type and model
model name  : Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU       M 330  @ 2.13GHz

But when i save them into a test.sh file and run sh test.sh, i get this error:

CPU type and model
tail: option used in invalid context -- 1

I also try bash test.sh and get this:

CPU type and model
tail: option used in invalid context -- 1
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Slightly off-topic, but you've got yourself a nice useless use of cat there. Wouldn't it be simpler to simply write head -n 5 /proc/cpuinfo | tail -n 1? – rahmu Apr 23 '12 at 6:48
I test it and get : invalid number of lines error. – Navid Farhadi Apr 23 '12 at 6:50
Apparently your versions of head and tail don't support the -n options. That was not my point. You could try head -5 /proc/cpuinfo | tail -1 – rahmu Apr 23 '12 at 7:07

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You have carriage returns and possibly other extraneous characters in your script file; use dos2unix to remove them.

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Thanks, I remove ; from end of first line, and one of errors fixed, but not all of them. – Navid Farhadi Apr 23 '12 at 6:23
1  
I think your current error is because legacy pre-POSIX options don't always work (I wonder about the shell and/or PATH you're using that does that, though). tail -n1 and head -n1 are the POSIX versions of tail -1 and head -1. – geekosaur Apr 23 '12 at 6:29
I change my script to tail -n1 and i get : invalid number of lines error. – Navid Farhadi Apr 23 '12 at 6:33
I wonder if you still have extra characters, then (garbage at the end of the option). Use cat -v to check for control characters in the script. – geekosaur Apr 23 '12 at 6:38
2  
That was where this response started... ^M is not a valid line ending character on Unix-like systems. Use dos2unix to reformat the line endings without the ^M, or tr -d '\r' or some other mechanism to remove them. – geekosaur Apr 23 '12 at 6:50
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