| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | root@ECA:~# cd /var | root@ECA:/var# mv core.* /* [clearly that trailing * was not meant to be there] | [bunch of errors about target already existing] "/*" matched every name in / (not dotfiles) The last name matched was /var. We know this because of the list that Lennart gave us later -- we might have had to figure this out ourselves. Ignoring the clashing names and /var, everything that was in / was moved to /var. | root@ECA:/var# ls | -bash: /bin/ls: No such file or directory Clearly some fundamental tools are impaired. The first reason (but not the only one) is that /bin has been moved to /var/bin (but we may not realize this right away). Note: usually echo is built into the shell so echo * would work as a substitute for ls | So what do you do now? Take a break to calm down. Anything you do in a panic is likely to make things worse. Make a plan. Before you take any step that might be irreversible. Exploring is OK. | I was able to fix it in about 5 minutes without using anything other | than what was on the running system? Interesting little problem. It's true that this is an interesting problem. But getting tricky when confronted with an emergency isn't always wise. I would probably boot from a live system on a USB stick, mount / somewhere, and look around. Fixing things from such a system is actually simpler than trying to do so from the busted system. You don't need a deep understanding of the mechanisms for run-time linking. You won't need to get the dynamic linker and libraries back onstream. A clean shutdown will be a challenge but it probably doesn't matter. After booting the live system, do an fsck on the original system's / to make up for a bad shutdown. | The original state of the system was: That's really nice to know. In many scenarios you would not know this. - this lets you figure out where everything went without any detective work (/var) - this lets you figure out what must be moved back.