Re: Misleading error when attempting to run foreign executable

[Chet Ramey]

On 10/4/21 10:06 AM, Ilkka Virta wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 4:46 PM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu 
> <mailto:chet.ramey@case.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Bash reports the error it gets back from execve. In this case, it's
>     probably that the loader specified for the executable isn't present on your
>     system.
>
>
> OTOH, for a script, Bash checks to see if the problem is with the 
> interpreter and reports accordingly:
>
>   $ ./foo.sh
> bash: ./foo.sh: /bin/noexist: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
>
> The shell does go on to stat() the file after getting ENOENT from execve(), 
> so I suppose it could
> add some clarifying note to the error message for the case of a binary file 
> too.

About the only other thing it could say would be "cannot execute" or
"exists but cannot execute" in addition to "no such file or directory."
The shell doesn't know anything else. I'm not sure that would be a
significant improvement: you already know you can't execute the file and
you can easily check yourself whether or not the file exists.

Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/