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I have already looked at similar posts in this forum related to bad interpreter and denied permissions, and was unable to find a solution to this problem.

I have a vps Linux x64 (v2.6.18; CentOS 6.7). I am working on a particular project (OpenClinica) for a client and I need to install Postgresql version 8.4 (old version, I know) directly from a .bin file. The file looks like postgresql-8.4.1-1-linux-x64.bin. As far as I understood, this .bin file creates some .sh files on /tmp/postgresql_installer/.

I was also told that this file works OK and has already successfully performed installations of Postgres on many other Linux (CentOS) systems running OpenClinica.

When I run it as root at the command line typing this

./postgresql* --mode text

I get the frustrating message below.

Error: 
Error running /tmp/postgresql_installer/getlocales.sh  : 
/bin/sh: /tmp/postgresql_installer/getlocales.sh: 
/bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied

What I have already checked (looking in this and other forums)

  1. the first line of getlocales.sh has #!/bin/sh in it

  2. there is a link sh -> bash* at /bin

    root@vps [/bin]# ls -l sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Nov 14 12:29 sh -> bash*

  3. sestatus is DISABLED

  4. I gave chmod x permission to postgres*.bin before I ran it.

  5. I have even tried to run postgres*.bin from ~/ with no success.

Any ideas?

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  • 2
    Have you forbidden executables files in the /tmp dir? – Rui F Ribeiro Nov 14 '15 at 21:12
  • What do you get from echo postgresql* in the directory you are running it from? – Jeff Schaller♦ Nov 14 '15 at 21:15
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    please show output of sed -n 1l /tmp/postgresql_installer/getlocales.sh - does that end with \r$? was the script edited or created on a windows machine? – cas Nov 14 '15 at 21:18
  • That would result into "No such file or directory". I just remounted noexec my /tmp and it also ends up with "Permission denied" when trying to run scripts from it. Perhaps OP has same setup. – user140866 Nov 15 '15 at 0:59
  • To @RuiFRibeiro: in /tmp/postgresql_installer there are only 3 .sh files and all have x permission. – Newbie186 Nov 15 '15 at 18:35
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As said, the problem was having /tmp mounted with noexec. The explanation is quite simple, some install scripts uncompress executables/scripts at /tmp and then try to run them.

I actually stumbled on this problem too by chance some moons ago, when I changed in a couple of servers /tmp to be noexec for security reasons, and then the install/update scripts of some Debian packages stopped working. As I had changed it on purpose it was quite easy to identify the problem at the time.

I still think it is a good idea to set /tmp to noexec in public webservers, however until now I have not researched much how to get around this particular problem.

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