Well, I am going to try a couple more chmod combinations, then if that does not go well, I will just reinstall, btw, I was used to burning files to cd with gui, my gui went on the fritz a few weeks back, how would I burn something from the shell?

this is how my permissions for the /usr/bin dir look like, the bold ones. check if yours are different. All the files in the /usr/bin directory should have the same permissions as the directory has. So when you chmod the /usr/bin dir make sure you user 'chmod -R permissions dir'

ok, mine looks like this:

so I should boot up with cd 1 again, follow the steps, and chgrp to bin, what would the numbers be to get the permissions to drwxr-xr-x?

yup, boot up with CD 1, chgrp to bin and chmod -R 755

well, changed permissions and everything, still having the same problem. Does Slackware have something like windoze system restore, by chance?

Not one that I can recall. As I've told you, next step is to reinstall the system but without formatting any of your partitions, and try to choose at least the same packages as before, so you won't risk a seg faulted prog. remain on your system. If that won't do the trick, you have to reinstall it by formatting your partitions. If you have a separate partition for your /home then don't format it, just mount it without format, if you have only one partition for the whole / then try making a backup somewhere, somehow with your most sensible data which you won't wanna loose and get on with it. And from now on, remember, don't change permissions to system directories and document yourself well before issuing a command that may brake your system like this. Good look, and never give up. We learn from mistakes.

No. But this is weird, you said you've tried 777, too. Why would one get segfault because of that? Segfault means some program causes error in the memory (pointer pointing wrong address etc). With insufficient permissions a process may fail to execute another one it uses and in turn that may cause a segfault; but with 777 permissions this cannot happen.

Was changing the permissions the only thing you did? Are you sure of that?

yes, thats all I did. I was trying to compile a program that used m4, but it kept saying m4 failed, so I figured I'd see if it was a permission problem, and it all went downhill from there.

ok, there is a new development. I switched to a different user, and bingo, I can use the commands that arent working under root. I guess that narrowsa the problem down some, but being able to use the other users is not going to help solve anything....

What do you mean by you can run commands as other user ? You can run commands which only root can run as a normal user, or you can run system wide commands like for example: ls , ps and on root you got segmentation fault at these commands ?

I can run ls, ps, and such as root, but I cant run chmod, chgrp, chown, make, and who know what else, those are the only ones I have tried, they say segmentation fault as soon as I try. I switched to another user, and those commands work, well, at least is gives me the options when I type the command instead of saying segmentation fault.

Just a tought... login as root and first run: /usr/bin/chown , afterwards run: /bin/chown . Does both give you seg fault ? Do this as root, remember.

yes, they both give a seg fault

did you make any upgrade to your system ? or you have the stable 10.2 version ?

I have 10.0, I have been running it for a couple years actually, I just usually used the gui to do everything. I havent done any kernel upgrades.