Recovering from Syntax Errors in /etc/rc.conf in FreeBSD

September 9, 2016 | bsd |

I have been exploring FreeBSD over the last few weeks. In fact, I moved this blog over to a server running FreeBSD tonight. Naturally, while fiddling around with /etc/rc.conf (the default init file of FreeBSD) with vi I made a syntax error. Upon rebooting, FreeBSD yells at me and starts a shell in a read only file system.

Loading configuration files.
/etc/rc.conf: 16: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string
Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:

At first, I was super sad and thought I had to reinstall everything (which would not have been so bad since the installation just takes a few minutes), but then I realized that it is not possible that I am the first person to ever make an error in this file, there has to be a way to recover. Sure enough, there is.

Remount the Root File System First we must remount the root files system. Go ahead and press RETURN to pop into /bin/sh
```
/sbin/mount -o rw /
```
Edit /etc/rc.conf Now that we have a read/write file system mounted we can edit our /etc/rc.conf file and fix the syntax error using vi
Reboot
Reboot, and FreeBSD will be back in action.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Underused Techniques for Effective Emails from Refactoring English
Death by a thousand slops from daniel.haxx.se
The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Occupation and Preoccupation

Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025

What do we do when the facts don't matter?

As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…

via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025

Back to the Future

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…

via flower.codes July 17, 2025

Generated by openring