Why is bash confusing this HEREDOC limit string as a command?

Question

I am trying to use nested HEREDOC blocks in a bash script.
Note

• The outer HEREDOC is user to run a list of commands as a different user via sudo
• the inner HEREDOC is capturing regular text to cat into a file.

# run some commands as regular user
sudo -s -u $reg_user << EOF
echo "installing Pathogen plugin manager"
mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle && \
curl -LSso ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim https://tpo.pe/pathogen.vim

# start the nested HEREDOC
#-----------------------------
#
echo "configuring \.vimrc"
cat <<-VRC >> ~/.vimrc
    "
    "======================================================
    " vim core settings
    "======================================================
    "
    " show numbers - to turn off :set nonumber
    set number

    " always show status bar
    set laststatus=2
VRC # limit string to close the inner HEREDOC

echo "more bash commands"

EOF # end the outer HEREDOC - NOTE: this is also the end of the 
    # entire script itself 

When this script runs, the output is:

/bin/bash: line 229: EOF: command not found

Why does bash think this EOF is a command and not the HEREDOC delimit string

• Im not sure if the white spaces between the beginning of the lines and the limit strings matter - if so let me know and I'll try to explain

update: here is a simplfied version of the script which has copy and pastable runnable code - that seems to produce the same-ish error

#! /bin/bash

# If you want to run this code you need to assign a valid user here
user="non-root user"

# run some commands as regular user
sudo -s -u $user << EOF
echo "installing plugins"
mkdir -p testdir

# start the nested HEREDOC
#-----------------------------
#
echo "configuring \.config_file"
cat <<-VRC >> /tmp/test_vimrc
    "
    "======================================================
    " vim core settings
    "======================================================
    "
    " show numbers - to turn off :set nonumber
    set number

    " always show status bar
    set laststatus=2
VRC 

echo "more bash commands"

EOF

output error is:

/bin/bash: line 22: warning: here-document at line 8 delimited by end-of-file (wanted `VRC')

Answer 1

There's a space after VRC. Remove it.