"No such file or directory" but it exists

Question

I simply want to run an executable from the command line, ./arm-mingw32ce-g++, but then I get the error message,

bash: ./arm-mingw32ce-g++: No such file or directory

I'm running Ubuntu Linux 10.10. ls -l lists

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  433308 2010-10-16 21:32 arm-mingw32ce-g++

Using sudo (sudo ./arm-mingw32ce-g++) gives

sudo: unable to execute ./arm-mingw32ce-g++: No such file or directory

I have no idea why the OS can't even see the file when it's there. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

This error can mean that ./arm-mingw32ce-g++ doesn't exist (but it does), or that it exists and is a dynamically linked executable recognized by the kernel but whose dynamic loader is not available. You can see what dynamic loader is required by running ldd /arm-mingw32ce-g++; anything marked not found is the dynamic loader or a library that you need to install.

If you're trying to run a 32-bit binary on an amd64 installation:

• Up to Ubuntu 11.04, install the package ia32-libs.
• On Ubuntu 11.10, install ia32-libs-multiarch.
• Starting with 12.04, install ia32-libs-multiarch, or select a reasonable set of :i386 packages in addition to the :amd64 packages.

Answer 2

I faced this error when I was trying to build Selenium source on Ubuntu. The simple shell script with correct shebang was not able to run even after I had all pre-requisites covered.

file file-name # helped me in understanding that CRLF ending were present in the file.

I opened the file in Vim and I could see that just because I once edited this file on a Windows machine, it was in DOS format. I converted the file to Unix format with below command:

dos2unix filename # actually helped me and things were fine.

I hope that we should take care whenever we edit files across platforms we should take care for the file formats as well.