:date: 2014-08-15 12:04

.. index:: puppet, puppet-lint, windows, linux, tech

Puppet, Puppet-lint and linebreaks
==================================
There was an interesting error today regarding Puppet, puppet-lint and the puppet syntax checker.  

While puppet-lint was complaining about a perfectly fine line, the puppet syntax checker did not show any problems.

Given was a code like this:

.. code:: ruby

   # === Class: rsyslog::client
   #
   #
   # ...
   class rsyslog::client (
     $var1 = '',
     $var2 = '',
     $var3 = '',
   ){
   
     package{'somepackage':
       ensure => installed,
     }
   }

When checking the syntax and style with puppet-lint, the tool returned an error pointing to line 5:

.. code:: bash

   $ puppet-lint rsyslog/manifest/client.pp
   ERROR unknown says Syntax error (try running  puppet parser validate <file> ) for init.pp on line 5

Following the advise running puppet parser returned - well - nothing:

.. code:: bash

   $ puppet parser validate rsyslog/manifest/client.pp
   $ 

Changing the file, rewriting it and deleting parts of it, did not change anything.

What happened here?
In this case the file I got was encode with the typical Windows line-break `^M`. This triggered an error in `puppet-lint`, but got past the syntax check in `puppet parser`.

After replacing the line-breaks with `dos2unix`, I was able to see the change in GIT as well.

.. code:: bash

   $ dos2unix rsyslog/manifest/client.pp
   $ 

This will certainly be memorized for future occasions.