Pacdif and meld on a packdiff new file that showed up about passwords has my system hosed up

General system Newbie
21

It’s a file, not a directory. You can’t cd into a file…

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22

When it doubt, it is better to ignore them than to merge them without understanding the potential impact.

23

I’m in tty, don’t have a live cd handy unless its a very old one.

Yes I can see it now.

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24

so I want to copy the passwd- file to the passwd file, assuming it’s a backup.

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25

Yes, that should get you back up and running.

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26

But first, look at the contents.
Simply something like
cat /etc/passwd
cat /etc/passwd-

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27

oops already done. We’ll reboot and see what happens.

28

Hope it worked… :pray:

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29

Well, it started to reboot normally. lots of errors about failing network synchronaztion. then black screen.

30

Ctrl Alt f2 brought the sceen back. and I see that it stops at 'graphical interface,

31

Errors before that say over and over ‘Failed to start Authorization Manager’.

32

That’s the next issue…
Can you show the output of

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | eos-sendlog
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33

That came back with https://0x0.st/HGHD.txt

34

I have the same problem. Updated fine. During update, got the warning about password.pacnew. Merged them, then broken system, cannot log in.

I did notice that using welcome v24-1 “Pacdiff & meld” the password.pacnew file only had one line in it. I thought that was strange but since I haven’t had my morning Tea yet I went for it.

Bad idea.

Pudge

35

Noticed when I went to merge that it was only going to be one line, so I decided to edit the passwd file and add the one line from passwd.pacnew to passwd. Rebooted and poured my 3rd mug of coffee.

3 Likes
36

Push comes to shove, I can probably use a live CD to get into the system to back up a few things to a second memory stick. I have the most critical things backed up already. Rebuilding the system doesn’t take that long…

But I won’t do that until later in the day, have an appointment at 11:00.

37

On a working system, passwd- does have a copy of the passwd file.
On the borked system, passwd- has one line for root and nothing else.

In a TTY window as root tried

passwd my-user-name

It kindly told me my-user-name does not exist.

Any other suggestions I can try?

Pudge

38

I don’t hold a candle to you guys, but I did find this maybe this would help?

39

Take a look at your /etc/passwd and be sure you didn’t overwrite with a a one line file.

2 Likes
40

I have 3 nearly identical machines. Could I copy the etc/passwd file from one of the others to the borked one? Or too much damage already?