/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory — how to fix

/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Quick fix: Run sed -i 's/\r$//' script.sh (or dos2unix script.sh). Prevent it with a .gitattributes line: *.sh text eol=lf.

What it means

The ^M is a carriage return (\r). Windows ends lines with \r\n, Linux with \n. Your first line is read as #!/bin/bash\r, and there's no program called bash\r.

Fix

sed -i 's/\r$//' script.sh

or

sudo apt install dos2unix
dos2unix script.sh

Check the result: file script.sh should no longer say "with CRLF line terminators".

Fix it in your editor

• VS Code: click CRLF in the status bar and choose LF, then save.
• Notepad++: Edit → EOL Conversion → Unix (LF).

Stop Git from converting it again

On Windows, core.autocrlf=true converts files to CRLF on checkout. Pin shell scripts to LF in the repository:

# .gitattributes
*.sh text eol=lf

Then renormalise once: git add --renormalize . && git commit -m "Normalize line endings".

Other "bad interpreter" causes

If there's no ^M, the interpreter path itself is wrong (e.g. #!/usr/bin/python on a system that only has python3). Use #!/usr/bin/env python3 or #!/usr/bin/env bash so the interpreter is found on PATH.

Last updated 2026-10-27.