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  • Don't forget that almost all external executables rely on library files. Sometimes catastrophes happen and those libraries can't be loaded (advice: NEVER issue ldconfig unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing). Also, what if you blow away your /bin, or worse, your /sbin partition, but still have a shell loaded? Commented Jan 3, 2011 at 16:09
  • If you run out of PIDs it can be difficult to find out which PID you want to kill. You cannot run a ps command, so you would have to find the PIDs manually through /proc. Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 14:13
  • Although on (at least) CentOS which is a bash alias that runs alias | /usr/bin/which --read-alias ... so the external which can identify aliases (but still not builtins). I can't decide whether to consider this brilliant or perverted. Commented May 26, 2016 at 1:41
  • At the point that ls command doesn't work anymore, I think you should be mounting the drive as slave instead of boot/master and fixing the file structure that way. I'm not sure how you could fix that extent of system corruption with echo unless you are echo > into a file and that would take a long time to fix. Granted you could write a bash script that was to fix the system structure. Commented Aug 4, 2018 at 1:07