[bash] Fixing a systemd service 203/EXEC failure (no such file or directory)

I'm trying to set up a simple systemd timer to run a bash script every day at midnight.

systemctl --user status backup.service fails and logs the following:

backup.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /home/user/.scripts/backup.sh: No such file or directory.

backup.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=203/EXEC
Failed to start backup.
backup.service: Unit entered failed state.
backup.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

I'm lost, since the files and directories exist. The script is executable and, just to check, I've even set permissions to 777.

Some background:

The backup.timer and backup.service unit files are located in /home/user/.config/systemd/user.

backup.timer is loaded and active, and currently waiting for midnight.

Here's what it looks like:

[Unit]
Description=Runs backup at 0000

[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily
Unit=backup.service

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Here's backup.service:

[Unit]
Description=backup

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/home/user/.scripts/backup.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And lastly, this is a paraphrase of backup.sh:

#!/usr/env/bin bash

rsync -a --delete --quiet /home/user/directory/ /mnt/drive/directory-backup/

The script runs fine if I execute it myself.

Not sure if it matters, but I use fish as my shell (started from .bashrc).

I'm happy to post the full script if that's helpful.

I ran across a Main process exited, code=exited, status=203/EXEC today as well and my bug was that I forgot to add the executable bit to the file.

If that is a copy/paste from your script, you've permuted this line:

#!/usr/env/bin bash

There's no #!/usr/env/bin, you meant #!/usr/bin/env.

I actually used the answer from How do I run a node.js app as a background service? combined with what dwrz said above. In my case, I was creating a Discord bot that needed to be able to run when I was not around.

With this service in place, I initially got the same error that the initial poster did, which brought me here. I was missing the #!/usr/bin/env node at the top of my executed node.js script.

Since then, no problems, although I intend to see what else can be extended to the service itself.

When this happened to me it was because my script had DOS line endings, which always messes up the shebang line at the top of the script. I changed it to Unix line endings and it worked.

To simplify, make sure to add a hash bang to the top of your ExecStart script, i.e.

#!/bin/bash

python -u alwayson.py