Fixing a systemd service 203/EXEC failure (no such file or directory)
I'm trying to set up a simple systemd timer to run a bash script every day at midnight.
systemctl --user status backup.service fails and logs the following:
backup.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /home/user/.scripts/backup.sh: No such file or directory.
backup.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=203/EXEC
Failed to start backup.
backup.service: Unit entered failed state.
backup.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
I'm lost, since the files and directories exist. The script is executable and, just to check, I've even set permissions to 777.
Some background:
The backup.timer and backup.service unit files are located in /home/user/.config/systemd/user.
backup.timer is loaded and active, and currently waiting for midnight.
Here's what it looks like:
[Unit]
Description=Runs backup at 0000
[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily
Unit=backup.service
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Here's backup.service:
[Unit]
Description=backup
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/home/user/.scripts/backup.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
And lastly, this is a paraphrase of backup.sh:
#!/usr/env/bin bash
rsync -a --delete --quiet /home/user/directory/ /mnt/drive/directory-backup/
The script runs fine if I execute it myself.
Not sure if it matters, but I use fish as my shell (started from .bashrc).
I'm happy to post the full script if that's helpful.
Answer
I think I found the answer:
In the .service file, I needed to add /bin/bash before the path to the script.
For example, for backup.service:
ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/user/.scripts/backup.sh
As opposed to:
ExecStart=/home/user/.scripts/backup.sh
I'm not sure why. Perhaps fish. On the other hand, I have another script running for my email, and the service file seems to run fine without /bin/bash. It does use default.target instead multi-user.target, though.
Most of the tutorials I came across don't prepend /bin/bash, but I then saw this SO answer which had it, and figured it was worth a try.
The service file executes the script, and the timer is listed in systemctl --user list-timers, so hopefully this will work.
Update: I can confirm that everything is working now.