I was changing the group permissions on /var/ftp and now I can not use any command in the bin directory. .... I had 2 shell windows open. One I am still loged in as root the other not. The one I am not I can not use the su command so I dont dare log out of the other window. I cant ( in either window) type ls, chown, chgrp, etc. I am really stuck., Any suggestions ? I have RH9 THank you very much Peter

1. Do you have any graphical file managers installed, and if so, have you tried using them to deal with this problem? It may be that at least on of these does not rely on the shell binaries. 2. Do you have emacs? If so, it is just possible that you have access to eshell, which is a shell implemented entirely in lisp. To find out if you have eshell, start emacs, and enter: alt-x load-file (hit return) eshell-auto.el (hit return). If this runs without error, visit your info files (from emacs, cntl-h i return) and read further what you need to do to start eshell. You will then be able to list files, change permissions, and so forth, independently of your access to the normal shell binaries.

Perhaps booting off a floppy or cd based distro like knoppix will allow you the mount your drive read/write and then add the execute permissions to your files in the /bin directory.

Thanks for the reply's. I was able to boot up in rescue mode and mount my root partition. I changed back the things I changed (took the entry I made out of /etc/shells, and changed the permissions of /var/ftp back to root.). However, when I rebooted, I got the following error "Kernel Panic. Try passing init= option to kernel " .. Any suggestions ? Thanks Peter

At the lilo prompt type: linux init=/dev/hdXX where hdXX is your root partition, eg hda1

I am not using lilo ... (using grub with redhat 8)

same difference....