The problem seems common when running a 32-bit binary on a 64-bit system.

Problem:

Running an executable file, the terminal returns “no such file or directory”. It’s weird for me, since there is even no errors.

~/ECE353/blitz/bin
❯ ls
asm  blitz  check  diskUtil  dumpObj  endian  Hello  hexdump  kpl  lddd

~/ECE353/blitz/bin
❯ ./asm
zsh: no such file or directory: ./asm

My environment:

Linux hostname 4.4.0-66-generic #87-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Solution:

After some search, I found installing the following library could solve this problem.

sudo apt-get install lib32stdc++6

However, I still don’t know why this solution works and how to find this solution at this moment.

Hints (Why?):

The problem may be result from the file type or dependencies of the executable. So we use file, ld and ldd to analyze the executable first:

❯ ld asm
ld: i386 architecture of input file `asm' is incompatible with i386:x86-64 output
ld: error in asm(.eh_frame); no .eh_frame_hdr table will be created.

❯ file asm
asm: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=0a16781f2f58f35473dec649fad1b1965b407bcc, not stripped

~/ECE353/blitz/bin
❯ ldd asm
        not a dynamic executable

After install libc6-dev-i386, we execute ldd again. We will have output:

~/ECE353/blitz/bin
❯ ldd asm
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf77c1000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib32/libm.so.6 (0xf775e000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf75aa000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x56573000)

The asm is a 32-bit executable, compared to the native htop:

/usr/bin
❯ file htop
htop: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=165c78eba08c4884f2af3881cf7999ebd0ed587f, stripped

P.S.: For stripped or non-stripped executable files, the main difference is the debugging information is removed from stripped executable files http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/2972.

Reference: