Hi, guys!
I've just run in a strange issue which I'm sure is a problem in my personal settings but I'm not familiar enough with the login routines to fix it by myself.
After upgrading to 12.2 from a 6 months old Slackware current, I suddenly cannot login on my laptop with any other user than root, even if I create new ones. I always get a "Cannot execute /bin/bash: Permission denied" message trying, either from the login prompt or when using "su - <user>" as root.
/bin is 755, as well as /bin/bash, so it should not be a problem of execute permissions. I have copied new files in /etc and subdirs to defaults files, except passwd and shadows. I copied the group file and added manually the proper user names for the proper groups.
Does anyone have any clue of what can be going on or at least provide with info on how to get any clue?
Curiously, /va/log/faillog and /var/log/lastlog files seem to be binary files.

Have you checked the permissions on the user's home directory? Specifically, whether they own it and have appropriate rwx permissions.

I'm sure something like that happened to me at some point in the past, and that was the problem.

This happened to me too. I also noticed some error messages about not being able to 'touch' certain files when using pkgtool and some other programs. I think I fixed it by reinstalling core-utils package, but this was a while ago now and I don't remember exactly or if there was anything else.

The home dirs are in 711 and correctly owned, which seems OK to me. That was an idea but it doesn't seem to be the problem here.
I'm going to try to reinstall core-utils tonight. Thanks for the tips!

rvdboom,

Did You use the old /home directory? If so, did You give the users their old uid? I got a horrible mess once, thanks to that I did not do that... Can't remember what happened, but it wasn't any good.

Jan-C.

I just upgraded a correctly working system and uid were not changed. Using "ls -al", I still see the home dir as being owned by the correct user with the correct group.
That was a good idea but unortunately not the correct one.
Does anyone know what file is read when one is login in? I suppose the /etc/profile, .profile in homes (I don't have any yet though), all the /etc/profile.d/*.sh files. Anything else?

/etc/login.defs, /etc/profile which sources /etc/profile.d/*.sh

Then first the first one found of ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile.

Nailed it!
Thanks to this link :

http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue52/okopnik.html

I discovered that my glibc package probably had some issue while being upgraded (I probably did some bad stuff while upgrading using swaret, which made the glibc package upgrade fail a bit) and all the libs in the glibc-solibs package were installed with 700 rights.
Turning them to 755 allowed me to log again as standard user.
Thanks to all the tips!