/bin/cat: Permission denied

[Micah]

jdow wrote:
> 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

Cat for i386 5.4 release can also be gotten from 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/5.4-RELEASE/base/base.aa 
  just use tar to extract it.

HTH,
Micah