/bin/cat: Permission denied

[jdow]

From: "Viktoras Veitas" <vveitas at erc.lt>

> Hello.
> 
> I suddenly cannot run "cat" command as /bin/cat file appears to be without
> execute permissions (all other files in /bin directory are with them) and I
> get "/bin/cat: Permission denied" error.
> 
> 
> 
> I had a misfortune to "chmod 555 /bin/cat", then my machine panicked (when
> trying to run "cat") and was not able to boot until I changed the /bin/cat
> permissions back to read-only. Anyway the system running again but I cannot
> install almost any port that uses cat in ./configure script.
> 
> 
> 
> I am running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p16 on Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
> (2992.52-MHz 686-class CPU), with two 200GB SATA disks and RAID1 geom
> mirror.
> 
> 
> 
> Output of dmesg is attached as file.
> 
> 
> 
> Question#1: How can I get rid of this problem and repair my cat file to be
> able to install new ports again?
> 
> Question#2: Why did this happen? I mean everything worked fine for a year or
> more until I decided to use hylafax on my machine and found that it cannot
> do documet conversion.

Maybe some kind soul you trust will send you a copy of the 5.4 cat
command. I'd suspect you redirected something to /bin/cat by mistake.

{^_^}   Joanne