bad interpreter

Hey Mike,

Couple of possibilities spring to mind:

- You used FTP from a Windows machine to transfer the script to the server, but didn't use binary mode (so it got Windows line endings which look like noise to a Linux system).

- You don't have /bin/sh

The latter seems very unlikely, since I don't think any Linux system will even start up without it. So, I'd bet on the first.

I like SCP or FTP over SSH for file transfers. It doesn't have any of the issues that FTP is prone to (text vs. binary, plain text passwords, ornery multi-mode protocol that sometimes fails to traverse firewalls and NAT devices in bizarre and difficult to diagnose ways), and is standard on every Linux system. If you're on Windows, you can use WinSCP, if you like a friendly GUI client (several other FTP clients also support the FTP over SSH protocol...sometimes also called SFTP, but that label applies to two different and incompatible protocols, so I try not to use the term), or there is also a PuTTY SCP client for the command line. Both work well. All Linux and Mac OS X desktops will already have the OpenSSH suite of command line clients.

Holler if neither of these is the answer. We'll dig deeper. I believe someone else had similar trouble with lines getting wrapper because his browser opened the file in a text editor, which wrapped the lines without him noticing, and then he saved that file...which is what he copied to his server. But, I don't think the error was precisely this--I'm pretty sure that would exhibit troubles later in the script, rather than the very first line.