Andrew Lowe wrote: > Hi all, > My machine went feral which resulted in me having to kill the > power to kill it. Upon reboot everything looked good, fsck did it's > job, [ok]'s scrolled up the screen etc and then I got the login > prompt. I entered my username & password and then the fun began. > > I got: > > -bash: .: /etc/profile.env: cannot execute binary file > > If I tried any command, say ls, I got: > > -bash: ls: no such file or dir > > I've now rebooted the machine using a relatively recent > sysrescueCD and had a look at profile.env and it's binary but I > thought it should have been text!!!! In the top line or so it mentions > "ld" for some reason. I checked the same file on the boot disk and > it's text. One or two I found on line are also text. > > Does anyone have any idea as to what's going on here? Should I > just grab the profile.env from the boot disk and drop it into the /etc > dir? Or should I go through the whole process of chroot off a gentoo > disc and then run env-update as it says in the header of the text > versions I'v seen? > > Thoughts greatly appreciated, > > Andrew > >
I've heard of that problem you have before but can't recall what causes it. This should give you some links to look into in the meantime. https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=%2Fetc%2Fprofile.env%3A+cannot+execute+binary+file&lui=english My main reason for replying, you may want to enable the Sys-Rq key sequence, if it isn't already. While rare, I sometimes get a hard lock up and at least that gives file systems a chance to sync up and to have a normal and safe umount of partitions. http://www.linuxhowtos.org/Tips%20and%20Tricks/sysrq.htm Hope that helps. Dale :-) :-)