mvim Bash Error — bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

Yesterday I reformatted my computer as it was starting to slow down. RAM and CPU usage was consistently higher than normal. Things just felt sluggish.

When I do a reformat like this, I ensure it is clean. This means that I only copy irreplaceable items from my backup, such as documents and pictures, but all of my applications I re-download and install from either the Mac App Store or their respective websites.

One key application I have been using a lot lately is MacVim. While useful on its own, it also comes with a BASH script for opening files in MacVim from the command line, called mvim.

As usual, I moved mvim to the bin directory in my home folder and ran it to see if it worked, only to receive the following error:

-bash: /Users/colincwilliams/bin/mvim: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

This was surprising as, on my previous install, mvim worked just fine from the get-go.

After some searching I noticed similar errors people had from other scripts. One of the common causes was incorrect line endings for the system: Windows is different than Mac OS is different than Unix. I won’t delve into the differences here, but you can read more about them in the Common Problems section of the Wikipedia Article.

On OS X, the simplest fix for this that I could think of was using Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler1.

To do this, open mvim in TextWrangler and in the menus select Text > Normalize Line Endings. Save the file and try executing mvim again. It should work just fine this time, opening a document in MacVim as expected.


  1. A great text editor to always have on hand. ↩︎