Binary not found

[Peter Flynn]

I have a copy of the commercial P-Stat statistics package in
/usr/local/share/pstat:

$ cd /usr/local/share/pstat/
$ ls -l
total 8716
drwxrwxr-x 2 peter peter   12288 Feb 25 19:52 helpfiles
-rwxrwxr-x 1 peter peter 7966976 Feb 25 19:52 p-stat
-rw-rw-r-- 1 peter peter  783052 Feb 25 19:52 pstat.help
-rwxrwxr-x 1 peter peter       7 Feb 25 19:52 pstatlp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 peter peter  113919 Feb 25 19:52 pstat.out
-rw-rw-r-- 1 peter peter   34865 Feb 25 19:52 pstat.test
$

(Yes, the binary *does* have a hyphen, to avoid confusion with the old
system utility called pstat.)

But when I try to execute it, I get a weird error message

$ ./p-stat
bash: ./p-stat: No such file or directory
$

which is obviously nonsense. The same happens if I execute the shell
script in my ~/bin directory (which implements my license key).

Does anyone know why the system is pretending that the file does not
exist which it clearly does?

It's not something obvious, like the filename containing a space or
other bogus character. The directory listing is correct, and a
comparison with the installation zip file shows the binary is the right
size.

I've been using the package for decades, and it has worked on every
system I have installed it on (and still does, on other hosts).

Peter