chroot: failed to run command ‘/bin/bash’: No such file or directory

Question

When I run the chroot command an error is given:

failed to run command ‘/bin/bash’: No such file or directory 

Answer 1

This error means that there is no /bin/bash directory inside chroot. Make sure you point it to where bash (or other shell's) executable is in chroot directory.

If you have /mnt/somedir/usr/bin/bash then execute chroot /mnt/somedir /usr/bin/bash

Answer 2

chroot tries to start the shell that is set in your $SHELL environment variable by default, but it looks for it in your new root dir, which seems not to contain /bin/bash, so it cannot start.

You can tell chroot to start another program inside the new root by simply adding it as a parameter:

chroot /your/new/root /bin/foo --options...

Note that the path of the command is interpreted inside your new root, so in this example the called program is in fact in /your/new/root/bin/foo

Answer 3

I was getting the same error when trying to ssh to a chrooted account on a remote server. In my case, I was missing the following file in the remote lib64 directory. Server is Centos6.9

ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

It was fixed by executing the following:

cp /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /secure/jail/lib64/