When you deleted /lib on Linux while still connected via SSH (2022)

Let’s first not talk about why this can happen, but deleting /lib , /usr/lib , or some other essential runtime files happens quite a lot (as you can see: here, here, here, and here). In this post, I will only discuss what happens when you delete /lib on Linux and how to recover from that. The easy solution for everything is to replace the missing files, but this can be difficult if /lib is deleted because we won’t have ld-linux , which is needed to run any dynamic executable. When you deleted /lib , all non-static executable (such as ls , cat , etc , will output): No such file or directory You will also be unable to open any new connection using ssh, or open a new tmux window/pane if you are using tmux. So you can only rely on your current shell built in, and some static executables that you have on the system. If you have a static busybox installed, then it can be your rescue. You can use wget from busybox to download libraries from a clean system. For your information: Debian has ... Read full article.