What does errno 86 (EBADARCH) mean?

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EBADARCH

EBADARCH is the Darwin program-loading result for a bad CPU type in an executable. It means that the image cannot supply an architecture usable by the process that is trying to load it. The file may otherwise be a well-formed Mach-O image; this code is about CPU compatibility, not necessarily file damage.

macOS binaries may be single-architecture or universal. A universal binary contains separate architecture slices, while a dependent dynamic library must be usable by the client image that loads it. Therefore, checking only the main executable is not enough: an app, plugin, helper tool, framework, and private .dylib can each introduce a different architecture mismatch.

Check the process-side architecture, then every image

• Use lipo -archs <path> for the main executable, the rejected plugin or framework, and its non-system dependencies.
• Use otool -hv <path> to inspect the Mach-O header and otool -L <path> to enumerate linked libraries.
• Compare the architecture of the process actually performing the load, not just the physical CPU of the Mac. A compatible host CPU does not make an incompatible in-process library loadable.
• For a distributed universal product, ensure that every required binary has the intended slices before packaging; adding an arm64 slice only to the main app does not repair an x86_64-only private framework.

Do not confuse it with adjacent failures

• EBADMACHO means that the Mach-O structure itself is malformed.
• ESHLIBVERS is a shared-library compatibility-version failure after the relevant library image is considered for loading.
• A missing install-name target is a path-resolution problem, not a CPU-type result.

References

• Apple XNU: errno.h
• Apple XNU: Mach-O CPU and file-type fields
• Apple: Building a universal macOS binary
• Apple: Dynamic-library architecture requirements

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