Re: trapped in bash

[Aaron Schrab <aaron.schrab@gmail.com>]

At 07:33 -0800 16 Dec 2016, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
>So I'm setting up a new machine with Debian 64 (using Debian 32 still 
>on old machine) and I'm thinking to just copy over my whole zsh 
>install from here to there and ... nope ... I 'cd' to where the binary 
>is and type  'zsh' and bash reports that it can't find the file.  Copy 
>it to '/bin' and it still can't find it.  Even the desperate '. ./zsh' 
>reports 'cannot execute binary file'.  I hope to gawd that an apt-get 
>install of zsh would work, but I'd like to use my existing setup 
>exactly as is. Do I have to rebuild? I'm new with 64 bit issues, 
>whatever they may happen to be, but I thought a 64 bit environment 
>could always run 32 bit apps.  Or have I forgotten something simple? 

The hardware and kernel are able to run 32bit binaries, but you can't 
use 64bit shared libraries with 32bit executables (or vice-versa).  You 
also need the 32bit version of the run-time dynamic linker; lack of that 
is why you're being told that a file isn't found.

Unless there was something really special about that build I'd either 
just go with installing via apt or rebuilding.

If you *really* want to use the same build you can likely do that with a 
multi-arch setup. To start with that would involve:

  dpkg --add-architecture i386
  apt update
  apt install libc6:i386

Once that is done the system should at least recognize that the old zsh 
build is executable. But you'll likely need to install several other 
i386 libraries; depending on the age of the system where that was built 
it's possible that the required versions won't be found for the current 
version of Debian.

The number of i386 library packages needed for this shouldn't be large, 
but a multi-arch system does mean that every `apt update` will fetch the 
package list for both of the architectures.

>Meanwhile  I'm trapped in the pre-fire age of bash out of the box.  
>Even 'ls -l' doesn't work, filenames only.

That shouldn't have anything to do with bash vs. zsh.