Michael,
so: why can i do "ls", "mkdir", "xterm", ... as root, but not as a normal user?
more strange things: "ps", "w", "less" and even "top" work ok, "cat" (!) crashes. "finger" runs perfectly, "who" crashes.
This sounds like a library problem to me. Check permissions in /lib, /usr/lib as well as all directories listed in /etc/ld.so.conf (both directory and file permissions), make sure that _everything_ is mode 755 and execute ldconfig. Did you have a full root filesystem upon reboot? In this case, /etc/ld.so.cache might not have been created correctly by ldconfig. If these hints don't lead to a result, please send me an strace of cat /dev/null mkdir who finger ls -la /dev/null personally, not to the list. It seems that the only common library used by those executables is /lib/libc.so.6 (since this one is the only one used by cat). Send an md5sum and ls -la of it, too, as with /lib/ld-linux.so.2. Regards, Roman. -- _ _ | Roman Drahtmüller "Freedom means that you can choose | CC University of Freiburg what you want to learn at a given | email: draht@uni-freiburg.de time." A. Becker, 1999 | - - People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.