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

[Doug Newgard]

On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 11:05:50 -0400
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

Do you have any kind of access to the machine's filesystem? You could build
ncurses5-compat-libs from the AUR and manually drop the libs into /usr/lib

Doug