bad interpreter: No such file or directory

carric has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am stumped.. I have a script for which I have verified perl is indeed where it should be, but if you execute it like this:

./script.pl

it gives the message

: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

IF you go into the script and change

#!/usr/bin/perl
to
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

It executes.. but there are SO many errors, it doesn't work (it's a CGI script from somebody, that has "issues").

Has anyone ever seen this?? It has some "require" statements for some other perl chunks, and I was wondering if that had anything to do with it, but I edited a few scripts, and it doesn't seem to affect anything.

The script lives on a local file system, and has proper permissions.

Thanks a lot ahead of time.

Update:

I did not see any control chars, but ran dos2unix anyway on it, and then it started working. Really strange.

Thanks everyone!!

Comment on bad interpreter: No such file or directory

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Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by BazB (Priest) on Jan 20, 2004 at 08:08 UTC
Check for control characters on the end of the lines - normally caused by copying scripts from one platform to another without correcting the line endings. If the information in this post is inaccurate, or just plain wrong, don't just downvote - please post explaining what's wrong. That way everyone learns.	[reply]
Re^2: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by Anonymous Monk on Apr 16, 2014 at 18:19 UTC
Thank you... It saved a lot of time for me.	[reply]
Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by dws (Chancellor) on Jan 20, 2004 at 08:56 UTC
If you FTP in binary mode (or otherwise copy) from a Win32 box to a box that's some variant of Unix, you have an invisible hidden carriage return (^M) at the end of each line. The "bad interpreter" that's being referred to in this case is `/usr/bin/perl^M` Copy the file in ASCII mode, or use dos2unix (or the equivalent), and your problem will probably go away.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by Anonymous Monk on Jan 20, 2004 at 09:17 UTC
Or just make sure you have spaces after /perl, something like `#!/usr/bin/perl -w -`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by BUU (Prior) on Jan 20, 2004 at 10:16 UTC
or use dos2unix (or the equivalent) Or of course use perl with the p and i switches.. `perl -pie's/\r\n/\n/g;'`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by cchampion (Curate) on Jan 20, 2004 at 08:38 UTC
Check out using -w breaks simple script where another monk had a similar problem.	[reply]
Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by Ophidions (Initiate) on Nov 10, 2011 at 10:13 UTC
This happens when executing scripts with a different line endings pattern different to that of the system you are running. Since it seems you are running on a linux system, open your script in an editor like geany then convert line endings to unix style. This is also encountered with apache. Regards.	[reply]
Re^2: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by Anonymous Monk on Feb 22, 2012 at 07:31 UTC
I ran into this same issue. Thanks for the help. It worked after removing the ending characters. I wrote my pl script in Notepad++ (windows), which was causing it.	[reply]
Re: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by Anonymous Monk on Jul 26, 2016 at 16:26 UTC
use dos2unix script.pl script.pl	[reply]
Re^2: bad interpreter: No such file or directory by Anonymous Monk on Oct 03, 2016 at 22:26 UTC
Sometimes, dos2unix complains it can not convert. But in linux, do a vi edit on this file, and add a space at the end, delete it , then save it for VI to understand it has to 'resave'. It became fine. Need time to debug this issue.	[reply]