“I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”

#1

Post by raphaelj » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:26 PM UTC

“I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”
unix.stackexchange.com

Re: “I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”

#2

Post by zxcvcxz » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

This gave me a good chuckle, but as the first comment in the thread states, this would be pretty hard to do without the admin password. If this is real, then I'd say all the blame is on the owner of the computer for having it in a state that allowed his /bin to be so easily deleted.

Nothing that can't be recovered from though.

Re: “I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”

#3

Post by thejrk » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

zxcvcxz wrote: post #2

This gave me a good chuckle, but as the first comment in the thread states, this would be pretty hard to do without the admin password. If this is real, then I'd say all the blame is on the owner of the computer for having it in a state that allowed his /bin to be so easily deleted. Nothing that can't be recovered from though.

So what commands would one have access to if /bin was deleted?

Re: “I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”

#4

Post by bsg75 » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

If this is not a troll attempt, some of the suggestions are as frightening as the problem.

Re: “I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”

#5

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

thejrk wrote: post #3

zxcvcxz wrote: post #2

This gave me a good chuckle, but as the first comment in the thread states, this would be pretty hard to do without the admin password. If this is real, then I'd say all the blame is on the owner of the computer for having it in a state that allowed his /bin to be so easily deleted. Nothing that can't be recovered from though.

So what commands would one have access to if /bin was deleted?

If you have a running shell, you will have at least the shell builtins, which include things that will let you list files (echo *) and write out data; you could, in theory, use echo or printf to generate a simple netcat binary, and then use that to restore /bin.

Probably easier to just boot from a USB stick and restore though.

[edit] And of course many systems have useful binaries in /usr/bin due to old hard drives being small.

Re: “I saw his recycling bin (/bin/). I empty it and now I can't open any programs”

#6

Post by jaguar86 » Fri, Apr 24, 2015, 1:18 AM UTC

Lol!! He was just trying to help!! :-)