OK, I just awarded myself the DAOTY award (dumb ass of the year). I decided to give the new PAM packages a try and reading the /testing/packages/PAM I installed all of the packages and then I read down to where binutils, glibc stuff were removed. Well, you guessed it - there has to be one in every crowd - I removed them. Feel free to rain a shower of rotten cabbages down upon my sorry soul. Of course the results are predictable.

I have booted Knoppix-8.6 and chrooted to the machine. I have a current copy of all files from Slackware64-current on my disk but the question is how to install the missing packages that I had previously deleted. There is no installpkg available obviously. Should I boot an installer DVD and then just install the required five packages? Any other way??? My brain is fried at the moment due to a frantic afternoon of trying to get my sorry carcass out of this. Ideas please.

I think you can fix it booting fom DVD install.
Mount the partition in /mnt and run installpkg --root /mnt <package>,
this will change the root partition from / to /mnt.

You must mount the dvd as well (/dev/sr0 ?) and install the missing packages.

edit- /dev/sr0 if it is indeed a dvd

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That was going to be my next thing to try. Thanks for the reply.

No such thing as DAOTY. Just lessons learned. We've all been there and done that.

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Happy to report all is well again and I'm back on my Slackware box with PAM and Eric's Plasma 5 modified for PAM. I booted Eric's latest -current installer, installed the missing bits and everything was go after that. Thank you upnort.

Here, here! I call them badges of honor, as long as I learned from them. Every now and then though...

Yup, everyone makes mistakes like this at least once. Hopefully you learned from it and only make it once (but there's been a few dumb mistakes I've more than once).

You're not alone, I've been using Slackware for 20 years now, but if they gave awards for borking your Slackware system, I would of made the Hall of Fame the first year.

I have 5 Slackware systems (plus my 1st-gen RPi runs OSMC for my HTPC setup). Once or twice a year, I manage to bork one of them... and it's usually my primary network server, which takes down the entire network.

Nowadays, my first thought isn't, "Oh no! What do I do now?". It's, "Ah, here we go again..."

LOL, know the situation well