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One that always annoyed me was running a 32 bit binary on a 64 bit Linux system - it says file not found, and when I first encountered that it threw me for a little while.

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Yep, that's the downside of syscalls only giving you a finite set of errors they can return, instead of being able to say "couldn't find DT_INTERP '/lib/ld.so.1'"

On the bright side, syscalls have manpages that accurately describe their errors. In this case, "man 2 execve" says:

> ENOENT The file pathname or a script or ELF interpreter does not exist.

Would you think to run "man 2 execve" when getting "file not found" with a random binary though?

No, but I'd think to do the ls and the strace as the author did. Then I'd check the manpage instead of stackoverflow. Obviously her way worked, too, but I prefer manpages. /shruggie

(Well, I just knew the answer in this case because I've hit this particular error a bunch of times, but that's not really the point.)

I actually agree with jmgao's point that this inscrutability is the downside of syscalls' limited error return; just pointing out the good as well as the bad.

Yes, you'd rather strace and as that also obscurely fails you'd then ldd the binary...

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