On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Kevin Buettner wrote:

> Nathan,
> 
> The command you're thinking of is ``chroot''.  ``chroot'' is well
> worth knowing about for rescue situations, but I don't think it will
> be of much benefit to Zach for solving his particular problem.  You
> see, Zach will need to restore everything that he inadvertently moved
> once he is able to run ``ls'', ``mv'', etc.  In order to do that, he
> can not change the root location to somewhere else or else he won't be
> able to restore properly.  I.e, if he were to somehow do a "chroot
> /graphics", this would mean that the the new / would actually be
> /graphics and he would be unable to restore /bin, /usr/bin, etc. to
> their proper locations since the old / is no longer accessible.
> 
[snip]

I've run into situations similar to Zach's, and I've used chroot (thanks
for reminding me of the name, btw).  What I did was chroot to the
directory with my stuff, and then I had a functioning system from where I
could then make boot disks, etc. for fixing my system.

However, I read your response to Zach's question after posting my
response, and your solution seems much more elegant.  I'll try it your way
next time I make one of those nasty root typos. :)

--

Nathan Saper
natedog@well.com
nsaper@sprintpcs.com (cell phone)
http://www.well.com/user/natedog/