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RESCUE(8) BSD System Manager's Manual RESCUE(8) NAME rescue -- rescue utilities in /rescue DESCRIPTION The /rescue directory contains a collection of common utilities intended for use in recovering a badly damaged system. With the transition to a dynamically-linked root beginning with FreeBSD 5.2, there is a real pos- sibility that the standard tools in /bin and /sbin may become non-func- tional due to a failed upgrade or a disk error. The tools in /rescue are statically linked and should therefore be more resistant to damage. How- ever, being statically linked, the tools in /rescue are also less func- tional than the standard utilities. In particular, they do not have full use of the locale, pam(3), and nsswitch libraries. If your system fails to boot, and it shows a prompt similar to: Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh: the first thing to try running is the standard shell, /bin/sh. If that fails, try running /rescue/sh, which is the rescue shell. To repair the system, the root partition must first be remounted read-write. This can be done with the following mount(8) command: /rescue/mount -uw / The next step is to double-check the contents of /bin, /sbin, and /usr/lib, possibly mounting a FreeBSD rescue or "live file system" CD-ROM (e.g., disc2 of the officially released FreeBSD ISO images) and copying files from there. Once it is possible to successfully run /bin/sh, /bin/ls, and other standard utilities, try rebooting back into the stan- dard system. The /rescue tools are compiled using crunchgen(1), which makes them con- siderably more compact than the standard utilities. To build a FreeBSD system where space is critical, /rescue can be used as a replacement for the standard /bin and /sbin directories; simply change /bin and /sbin to be symbolic links pointing to /rescue. Since /rescue is statically linked, it should also be possible to dispense with much of /usr/lib in such an environment. In contrast to its predecessor /stand, /rescue is updated during normal FreeBSD source and binary upgrades. FILES /rescue Root of the rescue hierarchy. SEE ALSO crunchgen(1), crash(8) HISTORY The rescue utilities first appeared in FreeBSD 5.2. AUTHORS The rescue system was written by Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>. This manual page was written by Simon L. Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org>, based on text by Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org>. BUGS Most of the rescue tools work even in a fairly crippled system. The most egregious exception is the rescue version of vi(1), which currently re- quires that /usr be mounted so that it can access the termcap(5) files. Hopefully, a failsafe termcap(3) entry will eventually be added into the ncurses(3) library, so that /rescue/vi can be used even in a system where /usr cannot immediately be mounted. In the meantime, the rescue version of the ed(1) editor can be used from /rescue/ed if you need to edit files, but cannot mount /usr. BSD July 23, 2003 BSD
NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | AUTHORS | BUGS
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