I'm pretty new to AWS and EC2 but I want to run instances with a user script after it's booted from another instance. I have installed ec2 tools and ran the command as it's explained in various examples like here http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ec2-userdata and Eric Hammond's tutorials. however when I actually use the command: "ec2-run-instances --key my-key --user-data-file myscript my-ami" it only runs the new instance but doesn't execute the script myscript contains: #!/bin/bash echo "hello" ~/output.txt I'm running ubuntu server 12.04 AMIs. the target AMIs are duplicates of the initiating instance. if I run curl http:// 169.254.169.254/latest/user-data the imported script is there.