Comments on: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

By: Ram

Ram — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:44:42 +0000

I was trying to run a script that I copied off the web and pasted into Notepad and saved to my Linux dev server. It had two problems - one, the shebang line referenced /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin/perl and two, the interpreter didn’t like my Windows linefeeds. I deleted the script and used vim to create the .pl file, corrected the shebang line and everything worked. Thank you for this very useful post that pinpointed both issues.

By: Tim_Myth

Tim_Myth — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:14:08 +0000

YOU ARE AWESOME!!! My webhost moved my site to a new server, and suddenly one of my cgi scripts quit working. I had the hosting company rebuild my site from a last known good back up, but still got the same problem. I poured over the code line by line, tried to figure out which directory was bad, and ripped a few hairs out (and there’s not many of those to spare!). I even lowered myself to asking one of my buddies for help. He’s a PhD candidate and the sacrifice was great, but I could not find my error. Even he could find no reason for the error (although he found much fault in my coding skills). I finally stumbled acrossed this post, and (not believing it could be that simple) had my site fixed in a matter of seconds.

By: rajput

rajput — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:22:41 +0000

Thanks for the information for “bad interpreter: No such file or directory” error. I too got the same error. But i solved it in a different way. I had written a script in Windows and was trying to execute it on a device with linux kernel. What is did is changed my Windows scripts file to a UNIX format. And Yes!!! The error was gone :-)

By: Rog

Rog — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:27:28 +0000

Thanks, I’ve never seen the construct Neville showed, it worked

By: memememe

memememe — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:31:39 +0000

Thank you so much for posting this! I spent all morning trying to figure out if there was something wrong with my Perl install (I’m on a 10.3.9 machine).. I even checked the ADC website for notes about Perl and couldn’t find anything!! perl -e was working but reading from my file wasn’t. Finally I searched on the “bad interpreter” error and found your page. I switched to “Unix” in BBEdit and it fixed it. Thank you so so much!

By: Neville Rowe

Neville Rowe — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:01:20 +0000

Perl used to recommend not doing #!/usr/bin/perl to get the interpreter. Instead you did

#!/bin/sh
exec perl -w -x $0
#!perl

or some other such construct - sorry, it’s too long since I’ve done this regularly.

This has the advantage that sh searches the path for Perl, rather than the location being coded in the script. -w is a special flag which tells Perl to scan for a #!perl line in the file and start executing from there. I appear to remember there is a slight downside that linenumbers when debugging are out slightly ?