Fixing a systemd service 203 EXEC failure no such file or directory

Question

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

User · Accepted Answer

I think I found the answer   In the  service file  I needed to add  bin bash before the path to the script   For example  for backup service   ExecStart  bin bash  home user  scripts backup sh  As opposed to   ExecStart  home user  scripts backup sh  I m not sure why  Perhaps fish  On the other hand  I have another script running for my email  and the service file seems to run fine without  bin bash  It does use default target instead multi-user target  though   Most of the tutorials I came across don t prepend  bin bash  but I then saw this SO answer which had it  and figured it was worth a try   The service file executes the script  and the timer is listed in systemctl --user list-timers  so hopefully this will work   Update  I can confirm that everything is working now

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

To simplify  make sure to add a hash bang to the top of your ExecStart script  i e      bin bash  python -u alwayson py

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

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