I have a hunch that you're character encoding is bad. Such as you're copying the IDP metadata file/xml to notepad in windows, and then saving and/or copy and pasting to linux search head. Or visa versa you're copying from linux to windows.
You should try using dosutils if in linux. apt-get dosutils, etc... it gives you commands called dos2unix and unix2dos. SO if you're uploading to linux, try running dos2unix on the IDP xml file first, and then maybe use cat to write the file to your console, then copy and paste into the search head on step 3.
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