File test.spec does not appear to be a spec file

Sep 3, 2020 timo

The problem

You want to create your own RPM package. You have written a spec file test.spec. But when you call rpmbuild you get the following error message:

root@linux# rpmbuild -ba test.spec
error: File /root/test.spec does not appear to be a spec file.

The cause

Your spec file contains German umlauts or other non-ASCII characters.

The solution

Remove all umlauts and other characters that are not in the ASCII character set from your spec file.

Note: The problem does not occur with all distributions, nor can it be determined by the version of RPM. Both SuSE 9.1 and SuSE 10.0 use RPM version 4.1.1. The problem occurs with SuSE 9.1 but not with SuSE 10.0.

Linux knowledge

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