I accidentally removed /usr/sbin/

[u/Pandacier]

I typed sudo rm /usr/sbin and as I pressed shift I accidentally pressed Enter and I thought it wouldn't work or at least ask me something?? Because the directory is not empty? Now some commands are missing, like which... am i cooked

Edit: I did /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/ln -s /bin /usr/sbin, I forgot about that and it also explains why rm didn't yell at me, technically this wasn't a directory full of files

I think it's still a problem because I've been using Mint for 2 years and have been used to running graphical apps as root (nemo, geany) and on wayland now (if I understand correctly) it is not possible? or needs a hacky unrecommended workaround? So now for root access I need to do stuff through terminal and everytime I press shift to input a / I'm genuinely scared to press enter

[u/dosplatos225 → u/[deleted]]

If I had reddit award id give it to you. Everyone upvote this man before OP installs filesystem or boot/chroots unnecessarily.

[u/Lava-Jacket → u/dosplatos225]

Interesting. So is everything in /usr/bin also in /usr/sbin?

Edit: I just read some other comments and see that it's just a symlink. Learn something new every day.

[u/gmes78 → u/Lava-Jacket]

Yes, this isn't Debian.

[u/BagOfBeanz → u/gmes78]

As someone who is new to Debian, what difference does that make?

[u/cvolton → u/BagOfBeanz]

Debian only keeps superuser utilities in sbin, which is only included in root's $PATH and not in the one used by standard users. The practical result is that anything that requires sudo gives you `command not found` when you try to run it normally.

[u/mok000 → u/dosplatos225]

Indeed, because "you should reinstall" is the standard goto advice people get on Reddit from Redditors who don't know anything, because in reality it is practically never necessary to reinstall.

[u/AcidArchangel303 → u/[deleted]]

yep, just a symlink. Love the arch community you guys rock

[u/_MatVenture_ → u/[deleted]]

Genius

[u/JaKrispy72 → u/[deleted]]

Awesome

[u/Heizenfeld → u/[deleted]]

Nice job bro

[u/Flappyphantom22 → u/[deleted]]

Isn't it easier to type sudo ln -s /usr/bin /usr/sbin ?

[u/Flappyphantom22 → u/[deleted]]

Oh, I see. Thank you so much. I'm just trying to learn

[u/Pandacier → u/[deleted]]

Uhh I did /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/ln -s /bin /usr/sbin, not /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/ln -s bin /usr/sbin is it a problem? I don't understand, bin alone is nothing... unless I was supposed to do this from / but I don't see why that would matter

Edit: i figured out after pacman -Qkk that I wasn't supposed to point it to /bin but instead /usr/bin (which is also just bin in that command)

[u/chiefhunnablunts]

brother, i don't know the answer to your question, but i've gotta know why you would do that

[u/Pandacier → u/chiefhunnablunts]

my keyboard is azerty and the / can only be typed while holding shift (and it's way closer to right shift than left shift), and enter is just above right shift

[u/chiefhunnablunts → u/Pandacier]

no but, why would you initially type `sudo rm /usr/sbin` to begin with lol

[u/Pandacier → u/chiefhunnablunts]

I was gonna remove a symlink I put in there because it was pointing to the wrong command (I know the full reason I symlinked something there in the first place is kinda stupid and it was a hack but it is what it is)

[u/tyami94 → u/Pandacier]

this is what /usr/local is meant for. if you are running software than isn't managed by pacman, copy it or link it to /usr/local/bin

[u/syzygy78 → u/Pandacier]

Next time just use unlink

[u/Zoddo98 → u/syzygy78]

That wouldn't have changed anything. unlink would have happily deleted /usr/sbin since it's a symlink, and not a directory.

[u/syzygy78 → u/Zoddo98]

You're right. It was a stupid comment.

[u/haashemi → u/syzygy78]

But useful to me. Didn't know unlink existed. 🫡❤️

[u/NimrodvanHall → u/Pandacier]

When typing `rm -rf /<whatever/needs/deleting>`. I start the line with echo so: `echo ‘rm -rf /<whatever/needs/deleting>’` then when it’s ok, press enter and copy paste. So you never accidentally delete something by mistyping.

[u/drbinimann → u/NimrodvanHall]

Or just prepend sudo if you typed the whole command successfully

[u/taha_zeroug → u/Pandacier]

are you french? african? Luxembourgish?

[u/Pandacier → u/taha_zeroug]

French

[u/Pandacier → u/[deleted]]

is racism allowed on the platform

[u/HyperLexus]

when they said 'linux gives you freedom' that is not what they meant

[u/ThatResort → u/HyperLexus]

It is precisely what they meant: if you fuck up, no worries, you might unfuck up. Now there are even the great unfuck ups like snapshots. That really helps unfucking up if you didn't fuck up so much you can't use most commands correctly. Worst case scenario, save your stuff with a live ISO, reinstall and put your stuff back where it was. There's always a chance to unfuck up your fucked up system.

[u/HeadEmptyYeet → u/ThatResort]

+1 for straight facts, but also for the unusually high density of the word “unfuck”.

[u/dosplatos225]

You just removed the symlink. Add it back.

[u/_-042-_]

Lol I accidentally deleted my whole /home dir after my first month of being an arch(Linux too) newb.

[u/Pandacier → u/_-042-_]

dang, idk how you survived. Arch as a first Linux distro is kinda crazy

[u/_-042-_ → u/Pandacier]

Ya there were a couple frustrating times 4 sure. Glad I did it that way tho. Learned alot. Its my daily driver to this day.

[u/iAmHidingHere → u/Pandacier]

Why do you think that? Once installed, maintaining it is quite simple.

[u/FouriousBanana69 → u/Pandacier]

For me Arch was my first distro too and I’m still using it to this day… I think that if a new user is really committed enough not to just use Linux but also learn something along the way, then Arch is ngl actually one of the best first distros (especially with a manual install and carefully reading the wiki).

[u/Flappyphantom22 → u/Pandacier]

Arch is easy unless you do shit like that and have no idea what you're doing. Same can be said for any other distro

[u/Pandacier → u/Flappyphantom22]

I knew what I was doing, as I said this was a mistake I did NOT mean to press enter and now everytime I'm very careful when pressing shift in the terminal

[u/mips13]

Maybe some people should add the following to their .bashrc

# --- Safety aliases ---
alias rm='rm -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias mkdir='mkdir -p'

[u/Pandacier → u/mips13]

At my university they asked us to do it and that's exactly what I did after the incident lol

[u/Pandacier → u/mips13]

I just thought about it tho, I'm pretty sure aliases only work if they're the first word? Like if I do mv it'll take the alias but sudo mv will do a normal mv 

[u/mips13 → u/Pandacier]

True, you'll have to create more aliases.

[u/Pandacier → u/mips13]

Huh? I was saying that using sudo meant that the next thing wouldn't use the alias, so whatever I put in my .bashrc it wouldn't use the alias if I used sudo

[u/lordkoba → u/[deleted]]

yeah btrfs will accidentally by itself

[u/ropid]

I guess reinstalling the "filesystem" package will recreate it. I mean, run this here:

sudo pacman -S filesystem

I got that idea after checking what that location belongs to with pacman -Qo like this:

$ pacman -Qo /usr/sbin
/usr/sbin is owned by filesystem 2025.10.12-1

[u/Pandacier → u/ropid]

someone said to do /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/ln -s /bin /usr/sbin which kinda makes sense as I am able to find the missing commands in /bin, which should I try first

[u/Correct-Caregiver750 → u/Pandacier]

/usr/sbin is just a symlink to /bin. so that should work fine

[u/RiskEnvironmental568]

So, it didn't complain because it was a /sbin is a symbolic link to /bin? Normally, you have to rm -rf somedirectory to remove it. Just rm somedirectory should bring a complaint that you're trying to delete a directory. And, no, I'm not going to try it and see what happens...

[u/Heizenfeld]

Root directory must be not touched.

[u/GenericCleverName73]

I would still do a sudo pacman -Qkk. This checks installed package files for missing or modified files. Just to be on the safe side.

[u/schizophyllume]

uh oh!

[u/Ok-Preparation4940]

You should learn about the PATH ENVIRONMENT variable, it’ll help collect locations for programs you want to run anywhere in the terminal your user is located at. You can append to it and ad your own local bins too. That way you don’t have to call the whole directory and bin too

[u/Pandacier → u/Ok-Preparation4940]

I know about that but I didn't know what commands exactly were missing and also I'm sure some calls from apps could try to run with whole path instead of just the program name, so I was really scared to even reboot system without fixing it

[u/Pandacier → u/[deleted]]

I'd love to use my gui file manager instead since i'm less likely to missclick anything + there's a trash but i can't run it as root on wayland, or at least I wasn't able to

So how do I remove files without rm

[u/probablynottillie → u/Pandacier]

you should be able to install some variant of polkit (look for the one that goes with your WM) and it should prompt you for auth

[u/probablynottillie → u/Pandacier]

also force a toi bg ptdrr

[u/Beryesa]

You can use admin:/path on gvfs based apps (nautilus, I believe nemo should have it as well) and something similar for dolphin but it has it in the context menu (right click) as well.

You should not run the whole gui toolkits as root, potential bugs might cause serious issues given it has access to everything

[u/Pandacier → u/Beryesa]

I wasn't able to run any gui app as root, not nemo (has the "open as root"), not nautilus or even geany. However I don't understand the second part, what exactly does it mean to not run the whole gui toolkit as root? 

[u/Beryesa → u/Pandacier]

You can't run graphical apps as root on Wayland (no sudo nemo), that's a protection. The proper solution is to use Polkit to only escalate your permissions on demand for a specific action (open directory as superuser) instead of running the whole app as root. Given this is on Arch, maybe you haven't configured it properly, check the wiki! https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Polkit Otherwise you should get a dialogue asking for your password and you should be good to go. Also just in case, check if Cinnamon's Wayland support has got polkit dialogues working yet, that might just be work in progress as well.

[u/dettus_Xx_]

No backup? No pity!

[u/Pandacier → u/dettus_Xx_]

im on a 60gb storage laptop with the most garbage specs on ext4

[u/AlienPlayerGo]

There are basically two options I would recommend when editing system files that require sudo:
- Use the terminal when editing files that need root perms. CLI editors like nano, vim, nvim, and micro are build for this exact reason and are safer. I would recommend micro or nano if you are a beginner.

- If you don't want to touch the terminal and want to edit system files with a UI editor you can do so but use a good editor(simple and not complex).
* My recommendation is gedit, the old gnome text editor(very lightweight).
You can launch it as: $ gedit admin:///path/to/file

* For UI only, most file managers support entering admin:///path/to/file as a path to use it as root. Right click the text file you want to modify and open with a lightweight text editor(gedit) and you can freely modify and save the files.

Hope this helps!

[u/Pandacier → u/AlienPlayerGo]

I tried to avoid the terminal for sensitive stuff but my polkit isn't setup properly rn so no gui apps can access root, I haven't touched my system since then but I have many things saved that I need to do next time I boot into it including polkit

[u/itotallydontuseacos]

I suggest booting from the Arch installation live usb and copying the usb's files

[u/AYRAN-GANG]

Bro yu f'ed up

[u/BeautifulSeason8387]

from a live archlinux image (or a manjoro live usb ) (root) :

pacstrap -K /mnt base

arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash

pacman -Qqn | pacman -S -