@aptalca
Sorry for wasting your time. I didn’t create the password secret files with echo but vim. I started investing some things and it turns out that .vimrc needs a setting set nofixendofline. Somehow without that setting it was putting another hidden character at the end of the line that I couldn’t see in the editor. I guess cat -A is also a nice command when trying to hunt down problems like this.
Bottom line: sorry for wasting your time.