Broken your mac by removing the execute permissions on /bin/bash, or otherwise need to get shell access to fix something? (Say, for example, you were foolishly trying to patch shellshock). Don’t worry! It’s concerningly easy.

  1. Reboot your mac holding down Cmd+R
  2. Go Utilites → Terminal
  3. You’re currently in a recovery partition. cd /Volumes/Macintosh HD/bin
  4. Do whatever you need to do to fix your machine, e.g. chmod a+x bash
  5. Restart, and everything should be fine.
updated: