When Configure Reports a Bad Interpreter...

Ran into a problem on my Linux box today that I hadn't seen before (and solved it! Gotta love a happy ending). I was trying to install ProFTPd built from source. I ran ./configure, and it was giving me the error:

bad interpreter: no such file or directory.

Mighty frustrating. Web searches turned up possible shell problems (which I did not think I had), or the possibility that the first line of the configure file was not written as #! /bin/sh (which it was).

The problem ended up being that I had extracted the tarball on a Windows machine and burned it to CD, then copied the directory onto the hard drive of the Linux box. When I un-tar'd the compressed file on the Linux box, the configure worked fine.

Lesson: don't decompress source files on Windows and expect them to work in Linux! Something in the back of my head was telling me that as I ran the tarball through WinZip, but I ignored it. Lesson #2: those little voices in my head aren't always crazy!