Question 39076 in Ubuntu Question posted in
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Cannot execute ls command in docker – Ubuntu

I’m trying to use docker compose to run my services. But for some reason I’m not able to call e.g. this command ‘ls -la /home’. It gives me an error:

Cannot start service test: failed to create shim task: OCI runtime create failed: runc >create failed: unable to start container process: exec: "ls /home": stat ls /home: no such >file or directory: unknown

whereas when I use just ‘ls’ then I see all the directories… what’s wrong?

Below is my docker-compose file:

version: "3"
services:
  mqtt_broker:
    build:
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
      context: ./
    network_mode: host
  test:
    depends_on: [ mqtt_broker ]
    image: ubuntu:22.04
    command:
      - ls -la /home
    network_mode: host
Tags:

3

Answers


  1. 0

    It might be a missing $PATH problem — does the following work?

    command:
  - /bin/ls -la /home
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  2. 0

    There is no command "ls -la /home". There is command ls that takes -la argument and /home argument.

    command:
  - ls
  - "-la"
  - /home

    Or alternatively, docker-compose will do the splitting if you pass a string instead of an array (consult YAML specification):

    command: "ls -la /home"

    Or just:

    command: ls -la /home
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  3. 0

    Enclose your command with the array notation (just like in Dockerfiles), so that it is properly joined together as one, instead of different parts being interpreted separately.

    command: [ "ls", "-la", "/home" ]

    To run multiple commands,

    command: ["/bin/bash", "-c", "ls -lah; whoami; hostname"]

    But as the comments pointed out, as this increases complexity, consider running a script instead.

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