Two points to be made here.

First, you rarely, if ever, want to set a script to have permissions (mode) 777. That give write access to your script to anyone with access to the machine. A mode of 755 should be sufficient to allow anyone to run the script. If it is just for you, you could use 700.

Second, I'm going to take a wild stab at your actual question and suggest that you:

• change the script to include the absolute paths of the scripts (e.g., /home/hsmyers/bin/firstscript
• enclose the name of your file in single quotes on the command line

Good luck!