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From: kdo@lucid.com (Ken Olum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Clobbered C library warning
Keywords: Miscellaneous
Message-ID: <2966@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 11 Nov 89 18:32:18 GMT
Sender: root@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
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Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 194, message 12 of 23

Here's a impressive way to lose that's probably worth knowing about in
advance: I attempted to install a new version of libc.so... by copying it
from another machine on our network.  In the middle of the copy, my
machine crashed.  When it came back up again, all the programs tried to
map in the partially-copied lib file, got memory-errors and aborted.  A
few programs worked, but csh was not one of them, so I couldn't log in.
Fortunately sh did work, so I was able to boot the machine single-user,
but then ls, cat, cp, more, and almost every other useful program was
broken.  Eventually I realized that I could get a list of possible
programs by type "echo /usr/bin/*", and then I tried them one by one until
I found that one of the few working program was mv, and I used that to get
the bad library file out of the way, and instantly everything was fine.

That was frighteningly close to having to reload from distribution tapes,
though.  The only way to fix this problem is to psych out that this is
what is wrong and find a program to fix it.

						Ken Olum
						Lucid, Inc.