Sudden loss of permissions

Hi,

I'm new to Linux, C programming and this forum, so I apologize if my question is out of place here but I'm hoping some of you could help me out.

I've been writing some simple C programs under Linux for a class I'm taking. Since I'm not a Linux user, I've been running Ubuntu in a virtual machine (VMare in case that's somehow relevant). Everything has been working fine until today I start up the VM and try to execute one of my programs ("mydiff" - one of the assignments for my course), only to get the following:

bash: ./mydiff: Permission denied

The first thing I tried was changing the file permissions, though I have no idea why they would have changed themselves, but I still have read and write permissions on the file. I noticed there was a checkbox for "allow executing file as program," which I enabled. Upon doing so I now receive this:

bash: ./mydiff: cannot execute binary file

So at this point I was pretty confused and since I only run the virtual machine for the purpose of C programming and don't have anything else on it, I decided to just copy my C programs over to Windows, delete the entire virtual machine and create a new one. I did that, copied the C files over again and am still getting the same error!

Note: this is NOT just happening with that one mydiff program but with ALL of my C programs. When I delete the binaries and compile new ones using the makefiles, I still get the same error.

Does anyone have an idea what is the cause of this?

Taylor

Is your executable compiled on linux with gcc?
What's the output of ls -l myprogram ? # myprogram is your executable

Thanks for the quick response!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bayint Naung

Is your executable compiled on linux with gcc?
What's the output of ls -l myprogram ? # myprogram is your executable

---

The program is compiled with gcc. We have very strict coding guidelines in this course so actually we have to compile with: -ansi -pedantic -Wall -c -g -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=500 (not sure if that may be relevant or not).

ls -l mydiff gives me:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 taylor taylor 5920 2010-12-12 17:58 mydiff

It seems you've execute permission.
If your code is compiled with gcc(on your vm), ./mydiff should work...

Hah yes I also agree that it SHOULD work but for some reason it doesn't!

Yes the code is compiled on my vm. Like I said, I have also tried rebuilding it by deleting the binaries and recompiling the source but I always have the same problem.

taylor@ubuntu:~/SysProg/1A$ ls -l mydiff
-rw-rw-rw- 1 taylor taylor 5920 2010-12-12 21:13 mydiff
taylor@ubuntu:~/SysProg/1A$ ./mydiff
bash: ./mydiff: Permission denied

taylor@ubuntu:~/SysProg/1A$ ls -l mydiff
-rwxrwxrwx 1 taylor taylor 5920 2010-12-12 21:13 mydiff
taylor@ubuntu:~/SysProg/1A$ ./mydiff
bash: ./mydiff: cannot execute binary file

Just to verify, the current working directory is also the directory where mydiff is located, correct? You need to cd to the place where mydiff is before ./mydiff works.

You've got -c in the command line.

linux - gcc compiled binaries give "cannot execute binary file" - Stack Overflow

Example

Code:

---

$ gcc foo.c -lm
$ ls -l a.out
-rwxr-xr-x 1 sc sc 7221 2010-12-13 05:18 a.out
$ file a.out
a.out: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, not stripped
$ gcc -c foo.c
$ ls -l foo.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 sc sc 1520 2010-12-13 05:18 foo.o
$ file foo.o
foo.o: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped

---

Maybe can you create simple C file.
say hello.c
and type

Code:

---

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  printf("Hello World!\n");
  return 0;
}

---

and compile with
> gcc hello.c
> ./a.out

@ Salem - yes you are correct, I just came to the same conclusion myself.

Compiling with just "-ansi -pedantic -Wall -g -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=500" creates a working binary that runs without problems.

Thanks to everyone for your input!