strange python scripting error

Thu Jul 23 12:14:03 EDT 2009

Diez B. Roggisch wrote:

> Mark Tarver wrote:
> 
>> I have a very strange error.  I have two test python files test.py and
>> python.py which contain the following code
>> 
>> #!/usr/bin/python
>> print "Content-type: text/html"
>> print
>> print "<html>"
>> print "<center>Hello, Linux.com!</center>"
>> print "</html>"
>> 
>> One file (test.py) works; you call it up and it shows a web page with
>> 
>> Hello, Linux.com
>> 
>> The other fails with a server configuration error.  Both are running
>> under Linux, same server, same permissions.  Running a character scan
>> shows that both files contain the same printable characters and are
>> therefore typographically identical.   They are absolutely the same.
>> 
>> The only hint at a difference I can see is that my ftp program says
>> the files are of unequal lengths.  test.py is 129 bytes long.
>> python.py 134 bytes long.
>> 
>> A zipped folder containing both files is at
>> 
>> www.lambdassociates.org/weird.zip
>> 
>> Any ideas welcome.
> 
> They have different line-ending-conventions. Not sure if and why that
> makes a difference.

Looks like the shell treats the CR as part of the interpreter name:

$ cat python.py
#!/usr/bin/python
print "Content-type: text/html"
print
print "<html>"
print "<center>Hello, Linux.com!</center>"
print "</html>"$
$ python python.py
Content-type: text/html

<html>
<center>Hello, Linux.com!</center>
</html>
$ chmod u+x python.py
$ ./python.py
bash: ./python.py: /usr/bin/python^M: bad interpreter: No such file or 
directory

Peter