Ошибка bin bash m bad interpreter no such file or directory

Have you ever been slapped with the /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory error when trying to run a bash script, be it from cron or command line?

If your answer is yes then you have reached the right place. This error is more common than you think and is quite harmless but nevertheless, it is annoying.

This issue is caused when you create scripts in Windows environments and then port them over to run on a Unix environment.

Unix uses different line endings therefore it can’t properly read the file you created on Windows. Bash scripts on the other hand are quite sensitive to line-endings. This is not just limited to the script itself. it extends to the data that the script processes.

With that in mind, it is important that one should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character n which is (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).

With Windows or DOS-style line endings, each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character rn.

The Bash script sees the Carriage Return r as ^M. In this case, the Carriage Return (^M or r) is not treated as whitespace. and is appended to the line as text wherever it appears at line endings. So this:

!/bin/bash

becomes:

!/bin/bash^M

Since there is no interpreter, command, directory, or file called bash^M we get the bad interpreter: No such file or directory error.

Solution to Fixing /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

There are several options one may have to solve this problem. Since we know ^M is an illegal character the simple solution is to get rid of it. We will just show you two simple ways to do it.

1. This can be done using the dos2unix program to convert the Carriage Return characters:

$ dos2unix filename

You can download the dos2unix program from this location.

2. Correct the problem from the source. That is whichever editor (Sublime, Notepad++, VS Code, etc) you use in Windows you should be able to change the settings to use the Unix style line endings.

For example in Notepad++ in the bottom right of the screen, you will be able to see the document format. By default, it will say Windows (CR LF). To change it either:

• Go to Settings > Preferences
• Select New Document
• In the Format (Line ending) section select Unix (LF)
• Click the Close button to save preferences

or

• Right-click on the Windows (CR LF) label on the bottom right of the screen to trigger the context menu.
• Select Unix LF

Each editor has their personalized ways of changing the Line ending format which should be shown in the bottom right corner of the editor window. Usually Left or right-clicking the label should display the options you have.

Conclusion

There you have it. You should be able to understand why and get rid of the /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory bash script error from all your scripts and data they act upon.

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This kind of message is usually due to a bogus shebang line, either an extra carriage return at the end of the first line or a BOM at the beginning of it.

Run:

$ head -1 yourscript | od -c

and see how it ends.

This is wrong:

0000000   #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  r  n

This is wrong too:

0000000 357 273 277   #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  n

This is correct:

0000000   #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  n

Use dos2unix (or sed, tr, awk, perl, python…) to fix your script if this is the issue.

Here is one that will remove both of a BOM and tailing CRs:

sed -i '1s/^.*#//;s/r$//' brokenScript

Note that the shell you are using to run the script will slightly affect the error messages that are displayed.

Here are three scripts just showing their name (echo $0) and having the following respective shebang lines:

correctScript:

0000000   #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  n

scriptWithBom:

0000000 357 273 277   #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  n

scriptWithCRLF:

0000000   #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  r  n

Under bash, running them will show these messages:

$ ./correctScript
./correctScript
$ ./scriptWithCRLF
bash: ./scriptWithCRLF: /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
$ ./scriptWithBom
./scriptWithBom: line 1: #!/bin/bash: No such file or directory
./scriptWithBom

Running the bogus ones by explicitely calling the interpreter allows the CRLF script to run without any issue:

$ bash ./scriptWithCRLF
./scriptWithCRLF
$ bash ./scriptWithBom
./scriptWithBom: line 1: #!/bin/bash: No such file or directory
./scriptWithBom

Here is the behavior observed under ksh:

$ ./scriptWithCRLF
ksh: ./scriptWithCRLF: not found [No such file or directory]
$ ./scriptWithBom
./scriptWithBom[1]: #!/bin/bash: not found [No such file or directory]
./scriptWithBom

and under dash:

$ ./scriptWithCRLF
dash: 2: ./scriptWithCRLF: not found
$ ./scriptWithBom
./scriptWithBom: 1: ./scriptWithBom: #!/bin/bash: not found
./scriptWithBom

If you are trying to run a shell script and getting the following error,

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

You may think that this is a permission issue and might try running the chmod 777 command to provide all the permissions to the shell script file, but that will not fix the issue.

The script indicates that it must be executed by a shell located at /bin/bash^M. There is no such file, it’s called /bin/bash.

The ^M is a carriage return character. Linux uses the line feed character to mark the end of a line, whereas Windows uses the two-character sequence CR LF. Your file has Windows line endings, which is confusing Linux.

Using sed Command

Remove the spurious CR characters. You can do it with the following command:

sed -i -e 's/r$//' NAME-OF-FILE.sh

Using dos2unix Program

Or, you can install the dos2unix program and then run the dosrunix command to fix the shell script as per unix operating system.

dos2unix NAME-OF-FILE.sh

To install dos2unix utility in your UNIX system, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install dos2unix

To convert the file back to DOS formatting, you cna use the unix2dos command.

Using vim Editor

If you do not have the dos2unix utility installed, you can use the Vim editor to convert the formatting of your shell script to unix. Open the file in the vim editor.

vi NAME-OF-FILE.sh

Run the following command,

:set ff=unix

Then write the file and close it using the following command:

:wq!

And you are done.

You can use any of the above mentioned techniques to change the formatting of your shell script to UNIX. We hope this article helped you with your issue.

You may also like:

• Unix vs Linux: Comparison Between Unix and Linux

• What is Vi Editor in Linux?

• Ifconfig Command in Linux

• Learn Basic Vim Commands

 The article explaining How to resolve /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory in Unix or Linux server.

Issue :

Sometimes we see below error while running scripts :

root@kerneltalks # ./test_script.sh
-bash: ./test_script.sh: /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

This is the issue with files that were created or updated in Windows and later copied over to Unix or Linux machine to execute. Since Windows (DOS) and Linux/Unix interpret line feeds and carriage returns differently. Window’s carriage returns interpreted as an illegal character ^M in *nix systems.  Hence you can see ^M in the above error which is at the end of a very first line of script #!/bin/bash which invokes bash shell in the script.

To resolve this issue you need to convert the DOS file into Linux one. You can either re-write the whole file using text editors in Linux/Unix system or you can use tools like dos2unix or native commands like sed.

Solution:

Use dos2unix utility which comes pre-installed on almost all distributions nowadays. dos2unix project hosted here.

There are different encoding you can choose to convert your file. -ascii is default conversion mode & it only converts line breaks. I used here -iso which worked fine for me.

The syntax is pretty simple you need to give encoding format along with the source and destination filenames.

root@kerneltalks # dos2unix -iso -n test_script.sh script_new.sh
dos2unix: active code page: 0
dos2unix: using code page 437.
dos2unix: converting file backup.sh to file script_new.sh in Unix format ...

This way you can keep old files intact and don’t mess with the original file. If you are ok to directly edit the old file then you can try below command :

root@kerneltalks # dos2unix -k -o test_script.sh
dos2unix: converting file test_script.sh to Unix format ...

Where -k keeps the timestamp of the file intact and -o converts the file and overwrites changes to the same file.

Or

You can use streamline editor sed to globally search an replace

root@kerneltalks # sed -i -e 's/r$//' test_script.sh

where, -i uses source file, edit, and overwrites to the same file. -e supplied the following script code to be run on the source file.

That’s it. You repaired your file from Windows to run fine on the Linux system! Go ahead… execute…!