readelf

Recently we tried to execute an application and we got the following error:

-bash: ./main: No such file or directory

This error occurred because our application was trying to use an interpreter that was not available on that machine.

We used the readelf utility that displays information about ELF files (including the interpreter information) to resolve our issue.

Specifically we used readelf -l ./main which displays the information contained in the file’s segment headers, if it has any.

(You can replace the parameter -l with --program-headers or --segments, they are the same).

From the data that was produced we only needed the following line:

[Requesting program interpreter: /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3]

so we used grep to filter out all other lines and then cut and tr to get the data after the : character (second column) and then remove all spaces and the ] character from the result.
The full and final command we used was:

readelf -l ./main | grep 'Requesting' | cut -d':' -f2 | tr -d ' ]';