Updating 2.6.5-pl to 2.7.1-pl gives PHP Parse error in config.inc.php

Hello Bob, and thank you for your EXTRA, it worked right away, even without the change to the “settings_version”.

Although I followed the upgrade instructions exactly and also studied the extended troubleshooting, I could not pull off the upgrade via ssh.
I must have overlooked something?
Anyway, many thanks to @markh and @bobray for helping me to solve the problem.