CUDA Toolkit 4.0.13 deleted /usr/bin on installation

thanks a lot for crashing my system

Any chance you could provide some additional information, like which Linux distribution you are using?

This sounds like a perfect illustration of why you shouldn’t give the toolkit installer an installation path of / .

I thought so too, but the toolkit script (at least the Ubuntu 10.10 version) appends /cuda to whatever path you type at the interactive prompt, so there is no way to install to / or /usr directly (and nuke /bin or /usr/bin). I just tried it out in a virtual machine and could not damage my files.

Is it possible to override that with a command line option?

The same for me. Also my /usr/bin/ was deleted by cudatoolkit_4.0.17_linux_64_ubuntu10.10.run
and no, I did not choose a stupid install directory. Actually I was just keeping to hit enter…
I’m on a Ubuntu 11.04 64bit system. I guess the problem is that I had already some “cuda toolkit packages” installed. The install script asked whether it should delete these first. Sadly I answered yes. The install script removed directory `/usr/bin/…/bin/’ from my drive. Thanks!!

At first I had followed this howto
However, then I ran into the “API mismatch” problem (different kernel and driver). I decided to start over and follow now this howto. There I had to reinstall the cuda toolkit. Now my system is gone.

Please fix this asap because it is a very bad example of software in the form as it is now (it doesn’t help people - instead it kills time).

cheers

The CUDA installer from NVIDIA does append /cuda to all install paths so in the usual install/uninstall scenarios no one will hit this bug. Some of the use cases where this issue got repro’d finally are scenarios where user specifically moved the compiler binary nvcc to /usr/bin or the user used a 3rd party posted debian package for CUDA toolkit. In case of such usage scenarios please use the attached perl script (cuda-cleaner) which will delete only CUDA files from your custom install location where nvcc and other CUDA binaries reside.

This issue is fixed in CUDA toolkits after CUDA 4.1.

cuda-cleaner.zip (1.01 KB)

4.1.28 also erased my /usr/bin directory. I’m not pleased. Ubuntu 12.04