Brain Teaser
Vignes Gerard M
ewsres15 at pc.usl.edu
Fri Oct 5 17:56:28 AEST 1990
In article <Oct90.150551.3649 at x.co.uk> mike at x.co.uk (Mike Moore) writes:
>Here's one (do NOT actually do this, it appears to be lethal):
>now assume that *everyone* is set to use /bin/sh (including root), how
>do you get out of this without rebuilding the operating system? I don't
>think there actually is one..... but....
I once loaded an operating system and foolishly set the default
shell to KSH before bothering to load the KSH binary. Even more
foolishly, I then logged out, and was greeted by a cannot execute
type message when I tried to log back in. I gave up after about
an hour and reloaded the system. Thinking back, I had the
networking software going and probably could have FTP'd the KSH
binary (or a new copy of /etc/passwd) over as root. I'm not
certain if this would have worked, but I know that it was a real
PITA to reload the system, and I felt pretty silly about it
afterwards.
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