Thanks Simon, this is what I ended up doing. My provider (DigitalOcean) mounted an Arch ISO for me, and allowed me to boot into it using the console access from their control panel. I was then by able to repair the installation by mounting my system and using pacman with the --root, --cache-dir and --config switches pointed at my install. Nick On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Simon Brulhart <simon@brulhart.me> wrote:

Le 26 oct. 2015 16:05, Nick Andryshak <nandryshak@gmail.com> a écrit :

...

Hello, I'm in a bit of a sticky situation, which is the result of me

being

...

an idiot and not knowing how to use Arch even after years of using it.

I reinstalled ncurses with pacman, which I assume gave me ncurses 6 and removed ncurses 5. But I didn't upgrade bash (or zsh), I guess is still linked against 5, because when I try to login I get this error:

$ ssh me@xyz.com Last login: Mon Oct 26 08:56:59 2015 from x.x.x.x -bash: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Connection to xyz.com closed.

I can't use sftp either. Oh, also, this is on a vps, so I don't have physical access to the machine.

Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks,

Nick

Are you able to boot from a different system in your VPS's control panel? If you have a 'network boot' or 'boot from ISO' feature, you could use it and reinstall bash with pacstrap from there.

Simon