I am trying to upgrade slackware 8.0 to 8.1.
following the instructions in UPGRADE.TXT on the Cd.
I first installed glibc and pkg utils.
Then I did
removepkg ? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?????? ??????? ????????
in /var/log/packages

for some reason, sed was missing and the removepkg
didnt work. Is this due to the wrong order of ? ?? ??? ...

anyways, I installed sed from a1/bin.tgz
and continued with

removepkg ? ?? ??? ???? ????? ?????? ??????? ????????

But this time, it seems 'sh' was removed
and so my removepkg(which uses #!/bin/sh)
stopped working.

Is is process I am following correct or did I do
something wrong?

thanks

You have to install all the slack 8.1 packages before you remove the old ones. Step three from UPGRADE.TXT

Okay, that was my mistake. But I dont want all
*/*.tgz, I want only a few. Is there a gui based
select program?

That would be "pkgtool"

Btw, now that I have already committed that mistake
how can I recover from that? I am not able to run any
of the package utilities. I can neither install new pkgs
not remove the old ones.

How does the setup program in fresh installation install
the first package?

I think that now you've got this far you only have two options,
1) Restore your system from your last backup.
2) Do a fresh install.

You have a tool, in each package directory you have a script named install-packages, which calls to the same app choosing menus that appear during install

I know it is a little late for this post but perhaps it might help.

The "sh" command is just a symbolic link to "bash" in the /bin directory. If bash is still present then recreate the link if you can get to a shell prompt.

ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh

If bash is not present then many other programs are probably missing as well by now. Probably best to just reinstall. Or else you will continue to have problems for ever more and wonder if it goes back to this problem.

Good luck!