tcsh if/then statement gives error

Question

I'm trying to do a simple tcsh script to look for a folder, then navigate to it if it exists. The statement evaluates properly, but if it evaluates false, I get an error "then: then/endif not found". If it evaluates true, no problem. Where am I going wrong?

#!/bin/tcsh
set icmanagedir = ""
set workspace = `find -maxdepth 1 -name "*$user*" | sort -r | head -n1`
if ($icmanagedir != "" && $workspace != "") then
  setenv WORKSPACE_DIR `readlink -f $workspace`
  echo "Navigating to workspace" $WORKSPACE_DIR
  cd $WORKSPACE_DIR
endif

($icmanagedir is initialized elswehere, but I get the error regardless of which variable is empty)

Answer 1

The problem is that tcsh needs to have every line end in a newline, including the last line; it uses the newline as the "line termination character", and if it's missing it errors out.

You can use a hex editor/viewer to check if the file ends with a newline:

$ hexdump -C x.tcsh                                                  i:arch:21:49
00000000  69 66 20 28 22 78 22 20  3d 20 22 78 22 29 20 74  |if ("x" = "x") t|
00000010  68 65 6e 0a 09 65 63 68  6f 20 78 0a 65 6e 64 69  |hen..echo x.endi|
00000020  66                                                |f|

Here the last character if f (0x66), not a newline. A correct file has 0x0a as the last character (represented by a .):

$ hexdump -C x.tcsh    
00000000  69 66 20 28 22 78 22 20  3d 20 22 78 22 29 20 74  |if ("x" = "x") t|
00000010  68 65 6e 0a 09 65 63 68  6f 20 78 0a 65 6e 64 69  |hen..echo x.endi|
00000020  66 0a                                             |f.|

Ending the last line in a file with a newline is a common UNIX idiom, and some shell tools expect this. See What's the point in adding a new line to the end of a file? for some more info on this.

Most UNIX editors (such as Vim, Nano, Emacs, etc.) should do this by default, but some editors or IDEs don't do this by default, but almost all editors have a setting through which this can be enabled.

The best solution is to enable this setting in your editor. If you can't do this then adding a blank line at the end also solves your problem.