On Sat, Nov 07, 2009 at 10:23:11AM -0800, John R Pierce wrote: > Kwan Lowe wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > >> How did you get it from machine to machine? This could be a line-ending issue > >> from a copy from windows or the wrong mode in ftp. > >> > > > > That is my guess too. This exact error will happen if the file is > > copied in Dos format to Linux. > > > > ah, yes, python, where whitespace is a syntax element Not necessarily anything to do with python; a shell script or perl program would suffer the same problem. See if a file beginning "#!/bin/sh" was sent as a DOS file then Unix would see it as "#!/bin/sh^M" (where ^M is the carriage-return character 0x0d) and so would try to run the script under "/bin/sh^M". This, clearly, doesn't exit. Same would be true for /usr/bin/perl^M or /usr/bin/python^M and so on. Victor was told do to "dos2unix" which fixes the problem but he ignored the info ("dos2unix?! Huh? Where's the dos?") so *shrug* As they say, you can lead a horse to water... -- rgds Stephen