I am wondering why cd does not work in shell script. It is as follows,
#!/bin/sh
cd test
mkdir $(date +%d-%mm-%Y)
When I run this, I get can't cd to test
cd: 2: can't cd to /test
Why is it like this?
11 Answers
I had the same problem. Turned out the problem was \r\n line endings.
To fix it, do
tr -d "\r" < oldname.sh > newname.sh
From http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?s=1cadd53b369d5408c2b9d53580a32dc4&t=67836&page=2
3 Comments
Mchl
Excellent. I had this issue when running Docker on Windows host and mounting windows folder as a directory in linux container. Adding this comment in hopes it will get indexed by search engines for people like me :)
Jim Chen
I god damn love you, dude.
Timmos
Same problem with WSL / docker. You could also open the file from Windows in Notepad++, and then do Edit > EOL Conversion > Unix (LF), then save the file.
Not really relevant for this question. I had the same error message, however, I was using
cd ~/foo/bar
After changing this to
cd $HOME/foo/bar
it was fixed.
answered May 17, 2015 at 18:54
Martijn Courteaux
69.1k48 gold badges202 silver badges297 bronze badges
2 Comments
BritishSam
Hero, this fixed my issue when cd'ing in a for loop on mac
Steve Hills
This fixed my problem. I learned "~" does not resolve to "$HOME" inside of double quotes. Thanks.
I had this problem, and was very confused for a while.
It turns out I had set my $CDPATH environment variable, which normally allows regular cd commands to work as usual. However, I was running my script in non-interactive mode, as "sh" (not "bash"), where the behavior is a little different. It seems that a command like:
cd subdir # works via interactive bash; not in script run via sh.
will work as expected in my interactive login shell, bash, even when CDPATH is set. However, when I run the identical command in a script (using sh), it failed with
myscript.sh: line 9: cd: subdir: No such file or directory
I modified it to be a relative path:
cd ./subdir
and it works! I believe the difference is in how the shell uses CDPATH. In one case, it searches both CDPATH and your current directory, but in the script it only searches CDPATH. This is similar to the behavior of PATH. If you leave . (the current directory) out of your PATH, then you have to type ./localbinary instead of just localbinary to execute that file.
This is my educated guess. When I set / unset CDPATH it breaks / unbreaks the cd subdir command, and cd ./subdir works in all cases for me.
1 Comment
Reid Moffat
Is it possible to do this for absolute paths? e.g cd /dir1/dir2/dir3
put pwd as the first line. Then see if that directory has a test subdirectory.
It looks like its running from the root directory
3 Comments
Abhishek
I am running it from my home directory and yes, I do have a test sub-directory.
Foo Bah
Your error message suggests you were running from the root directory '/'. what is the output from
pwd when you run it in the shell?
Douglas Gaskell
I cna't
cd to the output of pwd just shows "no such file or directory". But if I copy/paste the output to a cd in the terminal it works just fine.The answer by Benito Ciaro is on point. I would just like to add another method that you can use to remove \r\n line endings. Open the script in text-editor Sublime and in the menu
Goto View → Line Endings → Unix
This will remove the '\r' character from your script. Don't forget to save your file.
Comments
It depends on where the script is being executed from, if the script is in your $PATH, then it will be based off of the current directory you gave the command from (working directory).
If this is a script being run as a cron job, it's best to use a full directory path.
Example:
cd /home/user/test
Giving the full path will also work if the script is in your $PATH.
Well I got it working using ""
So in your case it would be:
cd "test"
/Marcus
Comments
2 is the errno for "No such file or directory". Are you sure the script test exists in the working directory of the script?
You might want to cd to a known "good" directory first and then cd into known child directories of that good directory.
2 Comments
Foo Bah
The working directory of the script will be the directory from which the script is launched. to test, have a script run
pwd
Matthew Iselin
And the working directory of the script is where you'll start from when you
cd to a directory, is it not? So if you run the script from a directory that does not have a test directory, it will fail. One solution here is to cd with the absolute path of test, or its parent (depending on the remainder of the script), allowing the script to be run from anywhere. Which is what I have already mostly stated in this answer.Make sure you are in the right directory
Run the command bellow to known where are you
pwd
Shell scripts are run inside a subshell, and each subshell has its own concept of what the current directory is. The cd succeeds, but as soon as the subshell exits, you're back in the interactive shell and nothing ever changed there.
Try this
. myscript.sh
Comments
I faced the same problem in ubuntu. My command shell is:
$ export DIR=mydir
then execute a script file that contains:
#!/bin/sh
cd ~/$DIR
giving output:
cd: 2: can't cd to ~/mydir
by trying many options, at the end it can only be solved like this:
#!/bin/sh
WORKDIR=~/$DIR
cd "$WORKDIR"
Comments
I don't know much about this but I changed the permission of the folder and it worked for me
chmod -R 775 ubuntu
pwd