environment variable in red hat 4.5.3

hi all,
i have installed extracted jdk-6u7-linux-i586.bin to /usr directory and created a link by the name java. so the path to java is /usr/java now when i try to set the environment variable for it in /etc/profile by adding this code
JAVA_HOME="/usr/java"
export JAVA_HOME
it gives me this error:
: command not found
: command not found
'bash: /etc/profile: line 6: syntax error near unexpected token `{
'bash: /etc/profile: line 6: `pathmunge () {

help me as its urgent.
how do i set the environment variable for it..
thank you

It looks like you've messed up your .profile. Can you show us the complete contents of your .profile?

here is the entire file i have just added the JAVA_HOME.
# /etc/profile

# System wide environment and startup programs, for login setup
# Functions and aliases go in /etc/bashrc

pathmunge () {
if ! echo $PATH | /bin/egrep -q "(^|

$1($|

" ; then
if [ "$2" = "after" ] ; then
PATH=$PATH:$1
else
PATH=$1:$PATH
fi
fi
}

# Path manipulation
if [ `id -u` = 0 ]; then
pathmunge /sbin
pathmunge /usr/sbin
pathmunge /usr/local/sbin
fi

pathmunge /usr/X11R6/bin after

unset pathmunge

# No core files by default
ulimit -S -c 0 > /dev/null 2>&1

USER="`id -un`"
LOGNAME=$USER
MAIL="/var/spool/mail/$USER"

HOSTNAME=`/bin/hostname`
HISTSIZE=1000

if [ -z "$INPUTRC" -a ! -f "$HOME/.inputrc" ]; then
INPUTRC=/etc/inputrc
fi

export PATH USER LOGNAME MAIL HOSTNAME HISTSIZE INPUTRC

for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do
if [ -r "$i" ]; then
. $i
fi
done

unset i

JAVA_HOME="/usr/java"
export JAVA_HOME

any body kindly suggest please

Red Hat version 4 is so old that the only reason anyone should be using it is if they have a 486 machine.

If you mean Red Hat Enterprise 4, I recommend installing the RPM.

You main problem, however, is that Sun designed it so that multiple versions of Java can live on the same machine. So if I wanted to run a Java 5 JVM, I'd set JAVA_HOME to something like /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_06 to select that version.