Bash: Syntax error: redirection unexpected
Does your script reference /bin/bash
or /bin/sh
in its hash bang line? The default system shell in Ubuntu is dash, not bash, so if you have #!/bin/sh
then your script will be using a different shell than you expect. Dash does not have the <<<
redirection operator.
Make sure the shebang line is:
#!/bin/bash
or
#!/usr/bin/env bash
And run the script with:
$ ./script.sh
Do not run it with an explicit sh
as that will ignore the shebang:
$ sh ./script.sh # Don't do this!
If you're using the following to run your script:
sudo sh ./script.sh
Then you'll want to use the following instead:
sudo bash ./script.sh
The reason for this is that Bash is not the default shell for Ubuntu. So, if you use "sh" then it will just use the default shell; which is actually Dash. This will happen regardless if you have #!/bin/bash
at the top of your script. As a result, you will need to explicitly specify to use bash
as shown above, and your script should run at expected.
Dash doesn't support redirects the same as Bash.
Docker:
I was getting this problem from my Dockerfile as I had:
RUN bash < <(curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moovweb/gvm/master/binscripts/gvm-installer)
However, according to this issue, it was solved:
The exec form makes it possible to avoid shell string munging, and to
RUN
commands using a base image that does not contain/bin/sh
.Note
To use a different shell, other than
/bin/sh
, use the exec form passing in the desired shell. For example,
RUN ["/bin/bash", "-c", "echo hello"]
Solution:
RUN ["/bin/bash", "-c", "bash < <(curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moovweb/gvm/master/binscripts/gvm-installer)"]
Notice the quotes around each parameter.