I figured out what the problem was. I had to link the zsh to /bin/bash/. I skipped that because I thought I only had to do that if I was using Fedora. I was using Ubuntu.

A buffer overflow attack is a lot more complex than this. First of all you need to understand assembler in order to perform this. After you disassemble the program and function you want to target you need to determine the stack layout when it's executing that function. Here's a sample of a buffer overflow it's using visual studio but principle is the same.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <math.h>

volatile double  test;

double function3()
{
    test++;
    return exp(test);
}

double  function2()
{
    return log(test);
}

double  function1()
{
    int a[5] = {0};           
    a[7] = (int)&function3;
    return exp(function2());

}
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    double a = function1();
    test = a;
    return a;
}

Thanks to disassembly we know that a in function1 is allocated before where the function saved the stack frame pointer. The value after that one is the return address where function1 should go to if it is finished.

00401090 55               push        ebp    <- we save the stack pointer
00401091 8B EC            mov         ebp,esp 
00401093 83 EC 1C         sub         esp,1Ch <- save space to allocate a[5]
00401096 B8 CC CC CC CC   mov         eax,0CCCCCCCCh 
0040109B 89 45 E4         mov         dword ptr [ebp-1Ch],eax  <- crt debug init a[5]  
0040109E 89 45 E8         mov         dword ptr [ebp-18h],eax 
004010A1 89 45 EC         mov         dword ptr [ebp-14h],eax 
004010A4 89 45 F0         mov         dword ptr [ebp-10h],eax 
004010A7 89 45 F4         mov         dword ptr [ebp-0Ch],eax 
004010AA 89 45 F8         mov         dword ptr [ebp-8],eax 
004010AD 89 45 FC         mov         dword ptr [ebp-4],eax 

From this we can conclude if we overwrite a[7] with a different address, the function will return not to main but with whatever address we wrote in a[7].

Hope this helps.