Sun, 11 Oct 2015 19:17:53 -0700 "Ian D. Scott" :

I had a fun time fixing that by scp'ing a staically linked busybox over using another system, decompressing the old package with that, using machinectl shell to gain root access, and then running pacman with LD_LIBRARY_PATH to where I decompressed the package to restore it. But then, I didn't even have to reboot!

Note to self (and others): keep a statically linked suid root copy of busybox handy.

Nice one! +1 I got unlucky as well but as it's just my old, not-so-important notebook and I had the archiso USB key within arm's reach, I simply pulled the plug. Perfect opportunity to plug this old DynDNS host of mine: http://allan.broke-it.net SCNR ;-) --byte

On Sun, 11 Oct 2015 19:17:53 -0700 "Ian D. Scott" wrote:

Note to self (and others): keep a statically linked suid root copy of busybox handy.

Busybox in the repo is statically linked, but you should really have a usb stick or PXE boot with a somewhat recent ISO because in many situations even busybox won't help you. Nice to keep it around anyway.

On Oct 12, 2015 11:01 PM, "Mauro Santos" wrote:

On 12-10-2015 09:49, Florian Pritz wrote:

...

On Sun, 11 Oct 2015 19:17:53 -0700 "Ian D. Scott" wrote:

...

Note to self (and others): keep a statically linked suid root copy of busybox handy.

Busybox in the repo is statically linked, but you should really have a usb stick or PXE boot with a somewhat recent ISO because in many situations even busybox won't help you. Nice to keep it around anyway.

I assume the "best" course of action in these cases is to use pacman with --root and give it the path to the hosed / right?

I wouldn't say it's the best in all scenarios, but it's a sure way of fixing the problem if you didn't happen to have a statically linked suid busybox ready.

-- Mauro Santos