[SOLVED] SH TAR Script nonprintable characters in filenames.

[ashton88]

Preface: Yeah - I'm a week-old-newb and I am missing something obvious.

My weekly tar backup script is (finally) running successfully, but the output filename (generated by variables in the script) has non-standard characters.

Line breaks (Nautilus) and Question marks (term) are showing up in the filing listing. I have been trying different combination of brackets/quotes to fix this. Any help from some scripting gurus is appreciated.

Script:
#!/bin/sh
COMPUTER=backup
NOW=`date +%F-%H%M`
tar cpj --checkpoint=.100 -f "/mnt/backup/${COMPUTER}-${NOW}F.tar.bz2" -X "/home/name/Documents/xfiles1.txt" -C / *

ls -l Output:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 771K 2008-10-03 12:03 backup?-2008-10-03-1203?F.tar.bz2

Many thanks in advance, and probably after as well! My wall has a big indent about the size and shape of my head from this.

[ashton88]

Ahhh... I figured it out myself when I bumped into another problem.

I initially wrote the script in notepad, and I didn't realize (read: newb) that there was a difference between notepad TEXT and Gedit TEXT.

So if anyone runs into this problem down the line, install dos2unix by running:

apt-get install tofrodos

And then convert your script to UNIX format by running:

dos2unix <scriptname>

Cheers.