Don't panic I fixed it, but I thought it might be useful for someone else one day. Anyway I was working on my server out of my home directory in a directory that only root has write permission in, so I was root. What I was doing was adding a whole pile of content to one of my sites, but it wasn't quite in the correct directory structure. No problems I thought to myself, I'll just write a bash for loop to sort it out, which I did, but I fubar'd it and after it had finished in that directory it went down the directory tree moving everything into a subdirectory. Of course it got to / and moved everything that it could in there... / ended up like this: tmp proc sys images In images was everything else. The result, commands don't work, I can't move things back, can't scp/ftp a statically linked mv in, etc. The fix: images/lib/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /images/lib:/images/lib/tls images/bin/mv /images/* . Then I just needed to go sort out the other directories that it had fubar'd, but that was easy because I could use normal commands again. If this ever happens to you, don't logoff, and use the command above to move things back the way they should be. (You'll need to replace all occurances of "images" in the above with the directory you moved things into. Yeah I'm an idjut, but at least I could fix it! MrG Moral of the story: Test quick "time saving" scripts before you actually use them!