Have you ever had your root hard drive fail and found that your shell prompt has forgotten every command? It isn’t fun. What you first notice is that whatever you type, it’s the same answer.
bash: /bin/vi: Input/output error
Eek.
Or a similar effect has been witnessed after the famous “rm -rf *” got executed under the /usr directory. This kind of thing would happen:
# ls bash: ls: command not found
This is because most of the commands you use at the shell command line are binary files residing under /usr/sbin, /usr/bin, /sbin or /bin, depending on your distribution. Once they’re gone, you’re dead in the water.
So if all you have is a CLI shell prompt, but no commands work, what can you actually do?
If the problem is due to a corrupted disk, you may be able to resolve the issue by rebooting into single user mode and running an fsck on the root filesystem. In the case of missing binary directories you’d probably need to rebuild your host completely. But before you do restore from your backups (you’ve got backups, right?), you may need to make a few tweaks or check a few file contents in order to get things back up and running again.
Continue reading
