Cygwin command not found bad characters found in .bashrc 357\273\277

I'm new to Cygwin, I just installed it and attempted to set some simple environment variables. However, when I open the command shell, I get the error "#357\273\277 command not found"

I found an article that discusses what the problem is and how to "discover" the hidden bad character: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/DataDiscussions/archives/2010/01/index.html but I don't know how to resolve the issue by removing the character (which I validated was a problem in my .bashrc file using the od command). I attempted to change the开发者_StackOverflow preferences view in Notepad++ to UTF-8 and ANSI to no avail, but the file was not altered at all.

Any help would be appreciated...

As far as I know, a common problem with files saved in Notepad++ as UTF-8 and Cygwin is that Notepad++ saves UTF-8 encoded files with a byte order mark by default. This BOM character is not quite compatible with unix-like environments like Cygwin.

If you need unicode characters in these files, then you can try using the "UTF-8 without BOM" encoding in Notepad++, otherwise you can use ANSI or other encodings that don't use a BOM by default.

Besides the encoding, make sure the file's saved with unix (LF) line-breaks.

Before feeding your files to cygwin bash, you can do a dos2unix conversion first to take care possible conflicts like CR LF. Open bash

name@host ~ $ dos2unix your_file.sh

It looks like if I change the encoding from UTF-8 to ANSI (not the view preferences), the file will update and the special characters are gone, fixing the "\357\273\277 command not found" issue. Hooray!

One way to strip these is in Linux is by using vi. If you say

vi filename

and then in vi use the ed command :se fileencoding=ASCII

this will strip the oddball characters out.

You can confirm this by saving the file and then running od -c on the file.

Before: od -c changes.sql | head 0000000 357 273 277 I N S E R T I N T O `

After: od -c changes.sql | head 0000000 I N S E R T I N T O ` c o n

Since you have edited your .bashrc outside of Cygwin and used a Windows editor, the editor might have messed up your newline character (ie. CR, R, etc.) You can tell Notepad++ to show hidden characters. I think you can find it in its settings. Changing charsets is one thing, but being able to see hidden characters is another.

This article mentions a few programs that you can use to convert text files from one standard to another. Try using dos2unix on the file (in the cygwin command line).