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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

#!/bin/bash

python -u alwayson.py    

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.