[SOLVED] glibc upgrade - what to do after rm -rf /lib/* without reboot

Question

Hello everyone,
edit: please read this whole post... better mention it here, too -> I cannot reboot. thanks
I messed up following this guide while doing the glibc (/lib) upgrade on my desktop. I ran into "Issue 2" and it said
If no other files are in /lib/modules, you can safely remove that directory.
Sadly I did
rm -rf /lib/*
instead of
rm -rf /lib/modules*
That means all the .so files in /lib (owned by glibc) are gone now. That means - besides other problems - I cannot use any binaries like "cp" anymore. I still have a root shell (bash), a nautilus, a Gedit and a Firefox open but cannot call ANY other binaries. E.g.:
[root@firefly ~]# pacman -Su
-bash: /usr/bin/pacman: No such file or directory
With Firefox I managed to get all the deleted libraries into my home folder (from my Laptop running Arch64, too). So there are now under "/home/killroy/dloads/lib" rather than "/lib". I cannot reboot this computer now so I have to get those files into /lib so that I can use my binaries again. I still have "echo" because it is a bash-builtin. Is it possible to somehow emulate / workaround a
cp /home/killroy/dloads/lib/* /lib/
Or is it possible to tell my still-running root shell that the library path where those glibc-owned libraries reside are not in /lib but in /home/killroy/dloads/lib now?
Any help would be appreciated, really
Last edited by kiLLroy_ow (2012-07-17 08:45:33)

Answer 1

progandy wrote:Can you still set the executable bit for files using nautilus?
Then download busybox: http://www.busybox.net/downloads/binaries/latest/
Set it executable and use the root shell to spawn an instance of the busybox shell /path/to/busybox sh
in the busybox you have now all requiered commands (wget, cp, chmod, tar, xz, ...)
OMG thank you, really!
Okay that did the trick:
With the busybox binary - after making it excecutable with nautilus - I could use its tar command to untar the glibc package and its cp command to copy the needed .so files to /lib using something like:
root # /path/to/busybox tar xf /path/to/glibc.tar
root # /path/to/busybox cp ./lib/* /lib/
Again, thank you.
This topic could now be closed (and maybe kept for reference for people who need to fix this without rebooting the system) I guess.