facter fails with: Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")

Question

Ich was working with puppet and facter to collect information from the puppet node. Testing the *.rb script however regularly failed with

WARN backup_key.rb - Command /opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d/backup_key.rb completed with the following stderr message: /opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d/backup_key.rb: 1: Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")") 

The content of backup_key.rb was correct:

Facter.add('backup_key') do setcode do Facter::Core::Execution.execute('/usr/bin/gpg --list-secret-keys | grep " [0-9A-Z]*$" | sed "s/\\\\s //g" | head -n1') end end 

And if copying the file's content to a new file, it worked, whentesting with

facter --custom-dir /opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d | grep backup 

Could it be the newline character? No, it was not.

Answer 1

The problem were file permissions.

As long as the script had the execute (x) permission, the error message occured.

Changing the file permission to 0600 solved the problem immediately.

file { '/opt/puppetlabs/facter/facts.d/backup_key.rb': ensure => file, owner => 'root', mode => '0600', content => epp('modulename/backup_key.rb', {}), } 

It seems that facter tries to run an executable file via linux shell, not via ruby.