Linux exec error, "not found"

Question

Running Debian/Crunchbang and I'm getting a strange error when I'm trying to run scripts. For example

exec: 392: ./firefox-bin: not found

I have never encountered this before and I could not find any good information on this, Is there anyone who care to explain what it means and why it occurs?

The file that is apparently "not found" do exist at that path and are owned by me and executable. I have also tried to execute it from different locations but without luck.

Solution 1

If you're sure that the file in question exists then what it probably means is that the 'interpreter' for the file is not found. As firefox-bin should be an ELF executable file the interpreter for it will likely be something like /lib/ld-linux.so.2 and it is that file that is probably missing.

Try running readelf -l ./firefox-bin to find out what the interpreter is - look for the "[Requesting program interpreter: /lib/ld-linux.so.2]" line in the output.

Solution 2

As TomH said, this is likely because the firefox-bin file has the wrong binary format (the "not found" message is misleading). You probably downloaded the 32-bit version of Firefox (the Firefox download page only offers 32-bit), and tried to run it on a 64-bit system that does not have backwards-compatible libraries. If that is the case, there are two solutions:

• You could grab a 64-bit release: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/

• Or you could install the ia32-libs package (that's what it's called on Ubuntu anyway).

Comments

[Linker3000]

Script sample??