[arch-general] Can't login after upgrading ncurses but not bash (partial upgrade)

[Eli Schwartz]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Nick Andryshak <nandryshak at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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 at 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
>

I don't think so -- not unless you had enough forethought to keep around an
account with a different *default* shell. You'll have to contact whoever
does have physical access.

... unfortunately it was only after this ncurses update that bash started
explicitly requiring libncursesw.so=6-32

--
Eli Schwartz