I have come across a problem while working with Process and ProcessBuilder in Java.
I have a line of code looking like this :
Process process = new ProcessBuilder("des.exe", String... params);
It works fine on my personal computer, but not on my testing server and I can't figure out why.
The ErrorStream give me this:
des.exe: MZ����@���: not found
des.exe: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
Both computers are on Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS with java 1.8.
Any idea where it might come from?
The most likely reason for the difference is that the file format of windows executables is not registered with the binfmt_misc handler in the kernel, which allows the kernel to execute various programs through helpers transparently. The error Syntax error: "(" unexpected typically means that the file got handed off to /bin/sh, instead of to wine.
So, check if the binfmt_misc file system is mounted (most modern linuxes do this automatically):
grep binfmt_misc /proc/self/mountinfo
should return some entries (might be autofs, might be binfmt_misc depends on the distro).
if it isn't then mount it:
sudo mount -t binfmt_misc binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc
you can tell what's registered by looking at the content of this directory. To register for running dos executables with wine you need to register it:
echo ':DOSWin:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:' | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
Once registered, executing the binary should happen transparently, and it should succeed through the ProcessBuilder.
Configuring this for the server at boot time is left as an exercise to the user.
If you want to skip this entire mess, then you can change the execution from des.exe to wine with the first argument of des.exe.