Syntax error: "(" unexpected (expecting word) --- in my bash script

Question

I have a bash script:

#!/bin/bash

VAR1="var1"
VAR2="var2"
VAR3="var3"

cat ${VAR1} \
    <(echo -e '<something>') \                       # <--------- here's the error
    ${VAR2}/file123.txt \
    <(echo -e '</something>\n<something2>') \
    ${VAR3}/file456.txt \
    <(echo -e '</something2>')

When I run it: sh my_script.sh, I get the error:

 my_script.sh: 9: Syntax error: "(" unexpected (expecting word)

update:

bash isn't found, "/bin/bash" doesn't exist. neither bash does.

Answer 1

Try :

chmod 755 "my_script.sh"

Then run it simply like this

my_script.sh

The #!/bin/bash line at the beginning is used to tell your system which shell you should run the script with. I think you are overiding this by executing it with sh my_script.sh. You could also explicitly write /bin/bash my_script.sh. Also if you have some bash specific syntax in your script, you should consider changing the extension to .bash to be more explicit.

---

EDIT

You don't seem to have bash on your FreeBSD distro (the default shell on FreeBSD appears to be tcsh). You can find here a tutorial to install bash on FreeBSD. The solution I provided should then work properly. Best of luck.

Answer 2

Obviously from the she-bang, that script is intended to be run by bash not sh (even though the syntax looks more like zsh syntax because of the unquoted variables).

You'll want to run it with bash or zsh. If those shells are not available, you can install them or alternatively, translate that script to sh syntax which should be straightforward here.

The sh language (both Bourne or POSIX) has no <(...) operator. That comes from ksh and is supported by bash and zsh as well. echo -e is non-standard and even with bash and ksh only works in some environments.

The standard sh equivalent would be:

var1="var1"
var2="var2"
var3="var3"

cat < "$var1" || exit
printf '<something>\n' || exit
cat < "$var2/file123.txt" || exit
printf '</something>\n<something2>\n' || exit
cat < "$var3//file456.txt" || exit
print '</something2>\n'