On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 11:13 PM American Citizen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello: > > Tonight, much to my consternation, when trying to use the "ps" command, > it was absent. I brought up Yast2 which is the software manager for the > system and reinstalled "procps" which is the pkg containing several > important system commands, such as ps and others. > there are several reasons this can happen. it is definitely not expected behavior, but also not especially concerning. > > Imagine my consternation when I discovered that ps was linking to > itself, 0 content file that is a problem > and the pgrep and pkill are identical files (ELF > signature) but md5sum showed the exact same file for each, that is normal > so they > obviously cannot be the true pkill and true pgrep but some other trojan > file perhaps? this is actually fairly common. a given executable knows what command was used to invoke it, so it can decide to behave differently if it wants to. since pkill and pgrep do mostly the same operations, and the differences between them are largely semantic, it makes sense that they can share the same executable. sysctl is also circularly linked to itself 0 bytes > this is likely a result of the same error in the upgrade process that caused the procps (and likely other) package to be deinstalled. what that exact cause is would be difficult to determine without being able to see the upgrade process in action. > Reinstalling using YAST2 is not working here and a bad miss install occurs. > at this point you are probably looking at a full system reinstall or restore from backup. > I also discovered that at root level four folders are linked > > /bin --> /usr/bin > > /sbin --> /usr/sbin > > /lib --> /usr/lib > > /lib64 --> /usr/lib64 > > Aren't these 4 folders supposed to be at root level, not linking over > the a subfolder under /usr ??? > it is becoming more and more common for linux distros to organize their files in this way. I personally am not a fan, but I'm sure there are those who are who will claim I'm simply afraid of change. > I really need the ps command to keep track of the PID tasks running, but > now I have nothing. > not just that - the ps command is integral to the proper functioning of a linux system. it is used by other utilities and system scripts. -wes
