One one computer i have an executable, let's say it's named "crazy" since that's how it's acting. When i go into the directory where it is and type "./crazy" i get "No such file or directory". It has executable permissions, proper ownership, as does the directory it's in. If i try the ldd command on it, that too says there's no such file. it won't run in a debugger, even.

On another machine, the same file exists in the same place and it runs fine. Same size file, same permissions, etc., nothing at all different.

Somewhere, something is different between these two machines. Anyone have any idea where to look, what it's likely to be?

Need more actual information about this command, permissions, etc or we'll just think you're smoking crack or something.

It sounds crazy! How did you determine it has proper ownership and permissions? Is the ls command able to see it?

Is this allowed by the LQ rules?

Sure, why not? Not like I'm making a personal attack but rather adding humor to the discussion to drag out more info so we can help the OP..

Remember, freedom of speech as long as you're not making personal attacks upon others.

permission is -rwxr-xr-x which means anyone should be able to run it. ls sees it fine, as does any command that deals with files other than executing them.

Yeah, I agree. I was just talking about LQ members making use of crack or other chemicals!

Well, that's their decision. Remember, it's not breaking the law until you get caught..

Is there any special attribute assigned to this file?

So why is this command so secret? Without any other information and the information provided, I agree, you should be able to run this command. I can't go beyond that without knowing any more details of this file, program, where it's located, exact full permissions... blah blah blah.. and so on..

If you have a binary that fails to run with: No such file or directory, it generally means that the file cannot even be loaded, which usually means that the dynamic linker can't be found. ldd actually executes the file in order to list the libraries it uses, so if even ldd doesn't work, this is often the problem.

Try something like

hexdump -C ./crazy | grep -A5 /lib

to pull out whatever dynamic linker it was linked against. Ordinarily, it will be /lib/ld-linux.so.2 but perhaps it's an old binary or it's not linked against glibc (uclibc maybe?).

(hexdump, of course is just to prevent random binary characters being printed to the screen).

If that doesn't find it, try

hexdump -C ./crazy | head -n 50

the linker should be near the start of the file, so this should show it up.

well it could also be a script that doesn't have the correct #! line so its actually complaining about not finding say perl or python

more info please
the EXACT FULL path
the os , fedora,slac,ubantu ,...
is it a script ( with or without ".sh")
and it's name

indeed, also,

ls -lt filename

file filename

had a similar problem and had to replace non apha/numeric characters with a ? character.