RealNitro’s Blog

I have been cleaning up and updating my Gentoo Linux system over the last few days. Tonight I decided to do a emerge -v depclean. Unfortunately this messed up my coreutils (I couldn’t use ls, mv, cp, …). The error I got was:

error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Because of this error, I couldn’t fix the problem by re-emerging coreutils without acl support. The only solution was getting libacl.so.1 (and libattr.so.1) and putting them in /lib/ (or /usr/lib/). All solutions I found on Google use a live-cd to fix the problem, but thanks to Ikke, I was able to fix the problem without rebooting.

If you’re lucky (like me), you have busybox installed. Everytime I needed one of the broken commands while putting the missing files in /lib/, I just replaced them with busybox $CMD.

Come to think of it, you don’t even need busybox… I got my replacement files from openswan.org, but I copied them to my server to make sure they will be available:

cd /lib/
wget http://www.realnitro.be/files/code/libacl.so.1
wget http://www.realnitro.be/files/code/libattr.so.1
# ls, mv, cp should work again
echo "sys-apps/coreutils -acl" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge -v coreutils
# clean up, these are no longer needed
rm /lib/libacl.so.1
rm /lib/libattr.so.1


I hope this spares someone from having to reboot with a live-cd. Good luck!