Testcontainers ExecAsync fails to run /bin/ls

July 9, 2023

I’m trying to exec something on an Oracle container created by Testcontainers. If I run

docker exec [pid] /bin/ls -ltr

Then the command works, but if I use the code below, it throws an exception

        _container = new OracleBuilder()
            .Build();
        var result = await _container.ExecAsync(new[] { "/bin/ls -ltr" });
        if (result.ExitCode != 0)
        {
            throw new InvalidOperationException(result.Stdout + result.Stderr);
        }

OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: "/bin/ls -ltr": stat /bin/ls -ltr: no such file or directory: unknown

>Solution :

The issue you’re experiencing with Testcontainers and the ExecAsync method failing to run /bin/ls could be due to a small mistake in how you’re passing the command arguments. Instead of passing "/bin/ls -ltr" as a single argument , you need to separate the command and its arguments into separate elements of the array.

Here’s an updated version of your code that should work:

_container = new OracleBuilder()
    .Build();
var result = await _container.ExecAsync(new[] { "/bin/ls" , "-ltr" });
if (result.ExitCode != 0)
{
    throw new InvalidOperationException(result.Stdout + result.Stderr);
}

By splitting "/bin/ls -ltr" into "/bin/ls" and "-ltr" , you’re providing the correct structure expected by the ExecAsync method. This way, it should properly execute the ls command with the -ltr flag inside the container.