Why does bash <command> fail to run?$ bash date/bin/date: /bin/date: cannot execute binary file$ /bin/dateFri Mar 18 05:59:24 EDT 2016$ bash -c dateFri Mar 18 06:00:39 EDT 2016
Why does `bash ` fail to run?
bash
From the manual:If arguments remain after option processing, and neither the -c nor the -s option has been  supplied,  the  first argument  is  assumed to be the name of a file containing shell commands.So bash date means read the date file and execute the shell commands it contains. Assuming there is no date file in the current directory, bash searches the path and finds /bin/date which is a binary rather than a shell script, hence the error.