Major Bonehead move:

[Jason White]

Stephen Dawes <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>After so many years of using Linux, I have finally done it, a Major Bonehead
>move. I wrote a script, and when I tested it, it went wild on me. When it
>ran it deleted the contents of /bin and I don't know what else. Any ideas,
>short of a re-install of the OS, on how to recover from this Major Bonehead
>move?

If you can still use the package manager, or get it installed, I suppose you
could reinstall packages as needed.

You could boot from a "live CD" or USB device, mount the file system, and use
the package manager from the "live" distribution to install packages.

Actually finding all the packages that have missing files should be possible -
Debian has debsums, for example, which will check the installed files against
a check sum database. You would then have to write a script to re-install all
those packages.

It might be easier just to take a list of the installed packages and then
re-install the entire system, but using the list of packages to automate the
installation.

This can be done in Debian - not sure about other distributions that aren't
based on Dpkg.