Agh.

If you're at a root shell and you accidently run:

rm -f /bin/*

What do you do?

My solution was reasonably simple, and involved wget to find the bash .deb package, and then ar to extract the contents into the two files :

• control.tar.gz - control information which I ignored.
• data.tar.gz - The actual package contents.

(See working with Debian binary packages for details of how this is done.)

Of course you cannot gunzip, or untar, the resultant archives because /bin/gunzip and /bin/tar don't exist. So what then?

Well I used Perl to do the gunzip step, then loaded the data.tar file into Emacs.

Emacs has an "archive mode" which allowed me to write the individual files from the archive out to disk (/bin/bash + /bin/sh respectively - I didn't create a symbolic link immediately)

Once that was done I used scp to place tar, gunzip, etc into place and then reinstalled all packages.

I'm sure there are creative alternatives, but I couldn't think of one under pressure...