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Asked: 2026-05-12T11:23:39+00:00

This is a new one for me: What does this error indicate? /usr/bin/perl: bad

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This is a new one for me: What does this error indicate?

  /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: Text file busy

There were a couple of disk-intensive processes running at the time, but I’ve never seen that message before—in fact, this is the first time that I can remember getting an error when trying to run a Perl script. After a few seconds of waiting, I was able to run it, and haven’t seen the issue since, but it would be nice to have an explanation for this.

Running Ubuntu 9.04, file system is ext3.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d guess you encountered this issue.

    The Linux kernel will generate a bad interpreter: Text file busy error if your Perl script (or any other kind of script) is open for writing when you try to execute it.

    You don’t say what the disk-intensive processes were doing. Is it possible one of them had the script open for read+write access (even if it wasn’t actually writing anything)?

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