[BusyBox] init difficulties

Brett Hunt bhunt at myrealbox.com
Thu Oct 9 15:23:54 UTC 2003


Steve,

You may be interested in an option found an some editors that show 
whitespace. For example, in vim I use the command
:set list
to show all whitespace characters. A '$' is placed at the end of lines, 
dots show trailing characters, etc. You can turn it off using
:set nolist

I work in a mixed Lin/Win dev environment and this has been invaluable 
for editing makefiles, python, and scripts to find errors. Another 
helpful thing has been
:set ff?
to see what the file format (ff) is set to: unix, dos, mac.
Then, if it is incorrect, a real problem for scripts, I set it and save 
the file again
:set ff=unix
:w
This has helped 'fix' broken scripts more times than I can count.

HTH,
Brett

Steven P Valliere wrote:
> If anyone cares, it turned out that most of my
> init script problems were due to the fact that
> the shell apparently treats some invisible/
> non-printable control characters as valid file
> (and/or directory) name characters and consequently
> was unable to find some things because some invisible
> junk was glommed onto the end of the lines.
> 
> I retyped the entire scripts (using ed directly on
> my target machine) and they work fine now.  Sigh.
> 
> I have some comments/thoughts for developers:
> 
> 1. I cannot think of any time that one SHOULDN'T
>    remove trailing whitespace from input lines --
>    whether from the command line itself or when
>    reading a script.
> 
> 2. Why would ANY character < 0x20 (space) be valid
>    in a file or directory name?
> 
> 3. Error messages that actually mean something
>    would also be a HUGE help.  For example, when
>    ash tried to execute a script but there was
>    invisible garbage at the end of #!/bin/sh it
>    simply reported 'File not found' (or something
>    to that effect) implying that the SCRIPT was
>    not found.  It REALLY should show the name of
>    the file it was looking for.  And insmod was
>    reporting .o: module cannot be located (or
>    again, something similar).  Needless to say,
>    I didn't have a single entry reading 'insmod .o'
>    to the error was much less than helpful.  In
>    fact, the error stripped the filename itself AND
>    the trailing garbage -- which would've instantly
>    illustrated the problem.
> 
> OK, I'll shut up now.
> Not that anyone's listening anyway.
> 




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