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I made a mistake in rc.conf, or another startup file, and now I can edit it because the filesystem is read-only. What should I do?

April 26, 2017edit file filesystem mistake rc.conf read-only startup

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I made a mistake in rc.conf, or another startup file, and now I can edit it because the filesystem is read-only. What should I do?

1 Answer

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When you get the prompt to enter the shell pathname, simply press ENTER, and run mount / to re-mount the root filesystem in read/write mode. You may also need to run mount -a -t ufs to mount the filesystem where your favourite editor is defined. If your favourite editor is on a network filesystem, you will need to either configure the network manually before you can mount network filesystems, or use an editor which resides on a local filesystem, such as ed(1). If you intend to use a full screen editor such as vi(1) or emacs(1), you may also need to run export TERM=cons25 so that these editors can load the correct data from the termcap(5) database. Once you have performed these steps, you can edit /etc/rc.conf as you usually would to fix the syntax error. The error message displayed immediately after the kernel boot messages should tell you the number of the line in the file which is at fault.