On Sun, 30 Nov 1997, T. Sean (Theo) Schulze wrote:

> I don't thik that I made clear that I can still move around the system 
> some as myself.  That limits what I can do though since I can't su or 
> logout and login as root.  Fortunately, I use bash as my shell, but root 
> uses csh.  bash is in /usr/local/bin so I still have it.  I can't change 
> any of root's login files, because I don't have permission.

Dont give up hope. It's surprising how much you can do to salvage a UN*X 
system. It seems you haven't lost so much. Dont power off the machine 
until you really are sure you cant fix it.

Take a look at 
http://www.CS.McGill.CA/~magus/unixrescue.txt
for a legendary story of "rm -rf" rescue. It may even give you ideas.

Is the machine connected (or can it be) through modem or ethernet? (this 
is a case where a floppy support could be useful).
If so, you can probably retrieve enough to start fixing things.

Do you have perl? It usually lives in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin and you 
can easilly type a very short perl program to replace /bin/ftp given the 
situation. I can give you perl source for that if you want.

Let us know how it goes.


-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Because user errors often produce unpredictable results, the user
should try to avoid them."

IBM MVS/XA System Programming Library.