[SOLVED] Can't Open Terminal (getpt failed: No such file or directory)

tacostick · 2011-01-09 05:34:38

This is really weird. Ever since earlier this evening, I can no longer open terminal emulators on my computer -- they can't spawn the child process. Sakura left me with a blank black window, and gnome-terminal said

There was an error creating the child process for this terminal.
getpt failed: No such file or directory.

I thought this had something to do with Cope (the colorizing program), because I went to a tty and /bin/ls wouldn't work--I guess something in the /usr/share/perl5 directory was messed up. But I disabled Cope (i.e., removed the perl5 stuff from my $PATH in /etc/profile) and terminals still won't open!

Possible triggers:
I updated today, and part of the update was coreutils. Is "getpt" part of coreutils? Also, I removed kdebase and some other kde packages before my update, if that may have done something. Only other thing I can think of is, I tried out backintime, the backup program, a few hours before this nonsense started. One of the directories set to back up was /etc.

Any ideas or questions are greatly appreciated -- I'm thinking about reinstalling!

Last edited by tacostick (2011-01-09 16:54:52)

ber_t · 2011-01-09 14:05:45

What's the output of the following commands?

# mount | grep pts
# grep pts /etc/fstab
# ls -l /dev/ptmx

tacostick · 2011-01-09 15:54:38

The first two returned nothing, and the third one executed successfully. Actually, I think the problem may be my /etc/fstab file. I just remembered that I also recently tried to fix automounting, and may have altered the fstab file. Any way I can revert it? I don't have a tilde version in /etc.

tacostick · 2011-01-09 16:29:26

The problem WAS /etc/fstab! Thanks! Yeah, I used "mountmanager" to try to set up automounting, and I guess it rewrote my fstab file without making a backup? And what it wrote was broken? Piece of shit.

Anyway, how can I make this thread say "Solved"?

ber_t · 2011-01-09 16:54:05

tacostick wrote:

Anyway, how can I make this thread say "Solved"?

By editing your first post...

Arch Linux

#1 2011-01-09 05:34:38

[SOLVED] Can't Open Terminal (getpt failed: No such file or directory)

#2 2011-01-09 14:05:45

Re: [SOLVED] Can't Open Terminal (getpt failed: No such file or directory)

#3 2011-01-09 15:54:38

Re: [SOLVED] Can't Open Terminal (getpt failed: No such file or directory)

#4 2011-01-09 16:29:26

Re: [SOLVED] Can't Open Terminal (getpt failed: No such file or directory)

#5 2011-01-09 16:54:05

Re: [SOLVED] Can't Open Terminal (getpt failed: No such file or directory)

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