I was just sshing into my linux box at home and I did the stupidiest thing, I installed libsafe with sudo using /sbin/installpkg, obviously I wanted to upgrade one, but instead of upgrading I did install, during the install phase it removes libsafe, after which point no cp, rm, mv work, nothing gets copied (they relie on the this shared library), and I cannot login anymore. Damn, I just hope I'd be able to do anything at home, except booting into single user mode (it is password protected, so I guess no dice there either) and Linus, RMS forebid re-install; I made a big time mistake, now let me think how to correct it since file-utils are dumped without the library, and library needs to be copied which requires file-utils - vicious circles.
Am I exaggerating or am I in a real problem here?
Any comments?

P.S. A little update, since I am still logged on home I'd be able to use a text editor to edit inittab not to prompt for the root's password. But I am a little confused how it might help me, well as the last resort I'd go for rescue mode. A little over my head. Well, we'll see what happens.
P.S#2 Is there rescue mode on slackware8.1? I doubt it. Is there?

Well yeah, rescue just mounts you hd at a mount point, which is where it is during the install. SO you just boot up, act like you are gonna install, then exit. Now it's mounted somewhere, if not, mount it and go.

Oh, and the cyclic dependencies thing really sucks, but I think it'll be a little easier than it sounds. It's not like you need bash to install bash, and if you installpkg it or something similar I think it'll just "work".

Worth a try anyway...

Cool

Hope you get it fixed without too much trouble. I started cloning my partitions a few months ago so that when I goof up bigtime, it's reallly easy to restore the previous image. It's saved my butt countless times already, and it only takes about 4 to 6 minutes to complete the operation.

Good luck with it...

The whole install C.D. can be considered a rescue disk as long as you pick the right kernel.

WRT to you mishap, you can use the rescue disk to boot, then mount your O.S.'s partition(s) from the H.D., then use the explodepkg to install the package manually. The process is pretty simple: (1)cd to the mount point where you mounted your WHOLE O.S. (according to your O.S.'s fstab), explode the package (make sure you run the "doinst.sh" script that comes along with the package you just exploded), and that should be it . . . reboot!

NOTE: The doinst.sh script is found under a directory called install, but when run it, you have to do it from the mount point where you manually mounted your O.S. from the H.D. and not from inside the install directory. So, for example, if you mounted your whole O.S. under /mnt (<- this should include your O.S.'s /, and others && should be your current location), you would run the script sh install/doinst.sh

GL

Yoohooo, problem's solved!!!
Thanks to mindi and mondo, I had a backup of bare bones made a couple of weeks ago, and I just remembered it yesterday, now I am running sweet 2.4.20 on my system, yay!!!

SWEET!! Gotta love it when things like that happen; it's like putting on a coat from last winter and pulling a 20 or 50 outta the pocket

Right on Boris,

Cool

Yep exactly, I was so despate I even forgot I had a backup (even though it was a bit outdated, I got on my feet after a couple of minutes).
Thanks guys.