shell script: bad interpreter: No such file or dir

Question

I want to go through the files in a directory with a for loop but this comes up.

echo: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

code:

#!/bin/bash
count=0
dir=`pwd`
echo "$dir"
FILES=`ls $dir`
for file in $FILES
do
 if [ -f $file ]
 then
  count=$(($count + 1))
 fi
done
echo $count

Answer 1

The echo: bad interpreter: No such file or directory is most likely coming from the first line, #!... which is called shebang line.

About the #!... line

This line hints the shell what interpreter to use to run the file. That can be e.g. bash, or sh (which is (roughly) a subset so a lot of things won't work), or basically anything that can execute the file content - Perl, Python, Ruby, Groovy...

The line points the system in cases like calling the script directly when it's executable:

./myScript.sh

It is also often used by editors to recognize the right syntax highlighting when the file has no suffix - for instance, Gedit does that.

Solution

To override the line, feed the script to Bash as a parameter:

bash myScript.sh

Or, you can 'source' it, which means, from within a Bash shell, do either of

source myScript.sh
. myScript.sh

which will work (roughly) as if you pasted the commands yourself.

Answer 2

That's a strange error to be getting. I recommend trying to find the source of the error.

One thing is to check the pwd command.

type pwd

Make sure it's /usr/bin/pwd or /bin/pwd, and verify it's not a script:

file /usr/bin/pwd

If it is a script, I bet it starts with

#!echo

Answer 3

If you did use Homebrew to install BASH,

Removing the #!/bin/bash will be suffice.

Answer 4

You can find where bash is located using command

whereis bash

and you can copy the bash path to the path where you are seeing bad-interpreter error.

Answer 5

Better do :

#!/bin/bash
count=0
dir="$PWD"
echo "$dir"

for file in "$dir"/*
do
 if [[ -f $file ]]
 then
  ((count++))
 fi
done
echo $count

or a simplest/shortest solution :

#!/bin/bash

echo "$PWD"

for file; do
 [[ -f $file ]] && ((count++))
done

echo $count

Answer 6

I had the same problem. Removing #!/bin/bash did the trick for me. It seems that is not necessary to add where bash is located, since it is on the system path.

I found another solution here. Change

#!/bin/bash

for

#!/usr/bin/bash