I just had someone call me up about something they perceive as a problem and I was not sure what to tell them. Anyways, it has to do with calling a shell on the commandline and passing it a command to execute, something like "sh ls" or "sh grep blah". Now oddly enough I did not know the following would happen:

[root@localhost root]# sh grep xmy
grep: /bin/grep: cannot execute binary file
[root@localhost root]# sh ls
ls: /bin/ls: cannot execute binary file

I tried this with bash instead of sh and got the same response. I tried it with tcsh and got the "tcsh: ls: No such file or directory" response. Anyone have a clue if this is appropriate behaviour?

Thanks for any responses.

Ok so I'm thinking now that this is the right behaviour. I would presume that if you call sh from the commandline and then pass it a parameter, it's expecting that to be an interpretable script and not a binary. I tries to read the binary and gives up once it realizes that it's not in a language it understands.

If, for some reason, you want it to execute things as if they were a command passed on the command line, use bash's "-c" option:

That is correct. Your initial invokation with sh would be akin to asking a picture-viewer to open a music file. You're asking it to do something it doesn't know how to do, and it's explaining it's confusion to you with an error message.