Later chars displaces previous chars in string concat and output

Question

I want to get the home directory of a GCP instance by

p=$(gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE_NAME -- 'echo ${HOME}')

Suppose the p equals to /home/abc. Then I do a simple str concat and echo with

echo ${p}/xx

I would naturally expect

/home/abc/xx

Instead, it returns

/xxme/abc

Interesting enough, later chars xx displaces previous ones ho. How come? Any one with the fix?

Looks like you're getting dos style CRLF line endings mixed in somewhere. — Shawn, Feb 04 '22 at 12:40
What version of `gcloud` are you using? If it's older than version 288.0.0, try upgrading and see if that helps. — Ted Lyngmo, Feb 04 '22 at 12:45
`Google Cloud SDK 334.0.0 alpha 2021.03.26 beta 2021.03.26 bq 2.0.66 core 2021.03.26 gsutil 4.60` — user1584887, Feb 04 '22 at 12:46
Ok, not that then. `p=$(gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE_NAME -- 'echo ${HOME}' | dos2unix)` may help. — Ted Lyngmo, Feb 04 '22 at 12:53
thx. But it needs to install extra `doc2unix`. Any native bash script? — user1584887, Feb 04 '22 at 12:56
Seems related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15520339/how-to-remove-carriage-return-from-a-variable-in-shell-script/51675022 — hedy, Feb 04 '22 at 13:24

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 04 '22 at 13:07

1

I address it by using the dos2unix solution in the question comment:

p=$(gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE_NAME -- 'echo ${HOME}' | dos2unix)

, despite the extra dependency.

answered Feb 04 '22 at 13:07

user1584887

2

Another option that will _probably_ work if you don't want to install `dos2unix` is to replace `dos2unix` with `tr -d '\r'` - that is, remove all CR characters in the stream. – Ted Lyngmo Feb 04 '22 at 13:25

1 Answers1