If you’ve ever written a perfectly reasonable Bash script on Windows, copied it to a Linux box, and been greeted by a mysterious
^M or a “bad interpreter” error, congratulations—you’ve met the joys of line endings. Windows Notepad loves to use CRLF (Carriage Return + Line Feed) to end lines, while Linux expects a simple LF. To Linux, those extra carriage returns are like unexpected speed bumps, and your script trips over them before it even gets started.The problem is that Bash is very literal. When it reads #!/bin/bash^M, it doesn’t politely ignore the weird character—it assumes you’re asking for an interpreter that doesn’t exist. From your perspective, the script looks fine. From Linux’s perspective, it’s wearing Windows shoes on a hiking trail and wondering why everything hurts.
This is where plain old Windows Notepad really shows its age. It’s great for quick notes and passive-aggressive reminders, but it has zero awareness of Unix-style formatting. So you end up writing valid Bash logic that’s wrapped in invalid line endings, and the script fails in the most confusing way possible. Nothing like spending 20 minutes debugging code that’s technically correct but formatted “wrong.”
Using Notepad++ is how you avoid this whole mess. It understands that different operating systems have different expectations and lets you save files with Unix (LF) line endings. That one small setting turns your script from “Why won’t this run?” into “Oh wow, it just works.” Moral of the story: write your Bash scripts with tools that speak Linux, or at least have the decency to translate—your future self will thank you.
Here are the links
Mobaxterm https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
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thanks for the message