I am the worlds biggest idiot. Trying to be clever, I managed to delete both ls and less from my /usr/bin directory. How the hell can I bring them back short of a reinstall?

Well I guess that you can reinstall the coreutils (for /bin/ls) and less package again. They are normal tarballs so extracting the files from it should work also.

Well, I would also ask if it's possible that you may have deleted any other things from /usr/bin besides just ls and less. If so, then it may be best to do a reinstall now, because it would really be a pain to find out every couple of days that you need to recover yet another command.

On a more positive note however, reinstalls aren't actually all that bad, so long as you originally set up your /home directory as a separate partition. If you've done that, then during the reinstall, you would just want to be sure to choose the "Do Not Format" on /home when you are defining your mountpoints, and you wouldn't end up overwriting any of your existing user data.

To say it a different way, if /home is on its own partition and you don't reformat it, then a reinstall of Slack will only affect the system and root directories and files, without causing you to lose any of your personal data which lives in /home. (Naturally, if /home is merely part of / then a reinstall would wipe everything out. As an aside, I would strongly recommend that /home always be a separate partition.)

Anyway, even if you do decide it's necessary to do a full reinstall, don't feel too bad about it. When I was first trying to learn my way around Linux, I must have gone through about 20 total rebuilds (repartition, reformat, reinstall, the whole 9 yards) before I finally got my act together. In a way though, I'm kind of glad I did, because I definitely learned a lot, and my attitude towards having to do it gradually changed from one of complete fear and dread to one of total nonchalance. Heck, I ended up doing so much partitioning that now I could do it in my sleep. Good luck with it whatever your decision is. -- J.W.

Installing those packages did it. Thanks a lot for the advice. I probably would've gone through a full reinstall if I hadn't been told about those packages.

Great you got it working but as JW said, reinstalls aren't that bad. It's not like the bleeding Win2k installer which freezes (and I'm not exagerating here) and the same bleeding point - hardware detection - about 10 times before it continues. In the end I thought, "Nope, can't be bothered"... Now I don't dual boot :P

Steve