On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 12:34:20PM -0400, Gary Dale wrote: > As an FYI, the scripts were the same on both servers because I had ssh > sessions on both and copy/pasted the script from one to the other. (cat > <script> on server 1, then use Konsole's copy and paste to select and paste > it into nano on server 2).
Copy and paste doesn't always preserve the actual contents of a file. What you get depends on several factors, including the behavior of the terminal emulator that you're copying from. Tabs may be converted to spaces, and I have no idea what other changes may occur. As a demonstration for myself, just now, I performed the following experiment in both rxvt-unicode and xterm, on Debian 10: 1) Run the command: printf 'a\tb\n' 2) Run the command: hd 3) Highlight the line containing the output of the first command, and paste it into the terminal, to be read by hd. 4) Press Ctrl-D. On rxvt-unicode, I get this output: 00000000 61 09 62 0a |a.b.| 00000004 On xterm, I get this output: 00000000 61 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 62 0a |a b.| 0000000a If your original script contained non-breaking spaces, or curly quotes, or literal tabs, or who knows what else, then there's a nonzero chance it will be altered by the copy/paste. This is why you need to *verify* that the two scripts are the same, not just assume that pasting did what you thought it did.
