[OT] How to fix a stupid chmod mistake without rebooting

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 23:45 -0400, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> For reasons I'm not entirely clear, / was world-writable on a machine
> (not the whole computer, just /). So I blithely ran:
> 
> sudo chmod go-rwx /
> 
> (note, no -R, I'm not *that* dumb).
> 
> to correct it (can't be giving out permissions willy nilly!).
> 
> Then, to admire my handiwork I did:
> 
> ls
> zsh: command not found: ls

Reminds of when I changed the permission on / on an old PDP11/60 and the
machine would not boot because of the bad permissions.  I managed to
turn off all access to "/".  There was no "rescue CD" in those days.
With the help of a colleague, we actual hand entered a small machine
language program at the console switches to correct the permissions on
the disk.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005