Fedora 23 - Can't execute csh/tcsh/sh

[tony j. podrasky]

I had Fedora 23 running on a laptop.

After getting it all tuned up, I built another partition, booted from it, and did a backup of the custom partition.

I later went to make another partition and I missed the note about "automatic repartioning", so I lost everything.

I rebuilt it, and then loaded a new partition from the tar.

The thing is, I can't log in - because it says that csh/tcsh are not executable. I sign on with my user/passw and after a second it kicks out. If I type in the wrong user/pass it immediately says so. Same thing with telnet. Same thing with root/tonyp.

Even if I boot it to single user I can't log in. When I try it goes into multiuser mode.

I've booted the other partition and looked at the custom file system and it looks good. I can even do /custom/usr/bin/csh and /custom/usr/bin/tcsh and they work fine..

Any ideas before I climb into the attic and get the DVD to try a recovery?

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] then loaded a new partition from the tar.

   Actual command used?  "tar" can do many things.  "-p", for example,
could be useful.

> Any ideas before I climb into the attic and get the DVD to try a
> recovery?

   That might be safer.

[tony j. podrasky]

#cd /

#tar -cvf .

<later>

#cd /custom

#umask 0

#tar -xvf custom.tar

I checked the attibutes on the files and everything looks good. Did an fsck on the partition when it wasn't mounted.

[Steven Schweda]

> I checked the attibutes on the files and everything looks good.

   If you got the suid/guid bits and the ownerships restored, then
perhaps running as "root" is good enough, and "-p" wouldn't have helped.
My use of "tar" has generally been restricted to dull-and-boring files,
not a whole OS with its many special details.

[tony j. podrasky]

I've been using TAR since the 1990's and have built many disks from tapes and drives.

I think the problem is a compatibilty issue with TAR from Fedora 16 and Fedora 23.

I copied the F-16 tar to the F-23 system and it doesn't work: when I try to use it the system says "file not found".

I can't get into the system - but I came up with a trick: I put a cron job that would send an xterm session to my F-16 box, so I could talk to the F-23 and do some testing - but the cron job doesn't fire up. I verified my coding by putting the cron job on the working partition and it works fine, but doesn't run on the broken partition.

I'm wondering if there was some changes made to the filesystem structure.

I'll look at the timestamp of the backup and then search the broken partition for anything that was changed after the original build. I can probably find all the things I did to customize it - especially disabling all the security features.

[Dennis Handly]

> when I try to use it the system says "file not found".

Did you use an absolute path to the executable?

Sometimes a "broken" OS will give that error if it can't find the 'interpreter" for the executable.

For Linux, it mentions "bad interpreter" and its name.

[tony j. podrasky]

Hi Dennis;

Yes, I had it on the thumbdrive where the custom.tar was.

I did a ./tar - and got the error.

I believe the only option left is to put F-16 on the thumbdrive, boot it, and then untar the custom.tar into its partition on the F-23 disk.