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I have a compiled program, a tagger to identify parts of text, which claims it does not exist.

When I attempt to run it via the command line, I get this:

user@place:/home/user/explicitRedactedPath$ ls tagger
tagger
user@place:/home/user/explicitRedactedPath$ ./tagger arg and other args
-bash: ./tagger: No such file or directory

This executable has to be called by a generated script, which is how I ran into this issue. What are the reasons this error could show up? I'm out of ideas on how to fix it.

Notes:

  • OS is Ubuntu
  • The executable was copied from another machine
  • The file does have execution privileges (it gives a proper not-allowed message without them)
  • I've tried copying the file to a different location (same problem)
  • I've tried replacing the file with a fresh copy (same problem)
  • The file does exist. Opening it with pico shows a file with binary data.
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Probably better asked on ubuntu.stackexchange.com – Oded Sep 28 '10 at 20:14
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Try ls -l ./tagger – Mark Ransom Sep 28 '10 at 20:15
do ldd ./tagger – nos Sep 28 '10 at 20:24
@MarkRansom ls -ld ./tagger return -rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 28938 2010-09-28 15:56 ./tagger – Strilanc Sep 28 '10 at 20:58
@nos ldd ./tagger prints "not a dynamic executable" – Strilanc Sep 28 '10 at 20:59
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 30 '10 at 0:49

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

The program was compiled for an incompatible architecture, resulting in a non-executable program. The error message stating "does not exist" instead of "invalid executable" is just a very misleading message.

Recompiling it on the target machine fixed the problem.

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up vote 1 down vote

Probably tagger is a soft-link and the target of the link isn't there. Reproduce like this:

$ cp /usr/bin/ld .
$ ln -s ld fff
$ rm ld
$ ./fff
zsh: no such file or directory: ./fff
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The command "pico tagger" opens up a file (looks like binary data), so it can't be a stale soft link. Edited the question to reflect this. – Strilanc Sep 28 '10 at 20:56
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@Strilanc, the file command is better for this than a text editor. In the above example the output of file fff would have been fff: broken symbolic link to 'ld' – jonescb Sep 28 '10 at 21:03
file tagger gives "tagger: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, not stripped". This is surprising, because ldd says it is not a dynamic executable. At this point I believe it's a mismatched-architecture thing and I should recompile on the target machine. – Strilanc Sep 28 '10 at 21:36
3  
ldd says it's not an dynamic linked executable because the executable is compiled on a very old machine, using a different dynamic linker than the system you're trying to run it on. i.e. the real error is /lib/ld-linux.so.1 (or some other version you don't have) cannot be found. – nos Sep 28 '10 at 21:59
@Strilanc: If you are on an x86_64 machine, then that's the answer. It's a rather misleading bit of output... – Daenyth Sep 29 '10 at 17:43
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up vote 0 down vote

You may be missing shared libraries.

Do 'ldd tagger' to see a list of required libraries. 

% ldd /bin/zsh                                                                                   
libcap.so.2 => /lib/libcap.so.2 (0x00007f50ce8db000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f50ce6d7000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f50ce201000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f50cdea0000)
libattr.so.1 => /lib/libattr.so.1 (0x00007f50cdc9b000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f50ceaf8000)

If one of them is missing it will not have a path next to it.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you can't recompile, you might consider using statifier to map a dynamic executable into a statically linked one. Note, I haven't personally tried it.

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