I have a similar funny story of recovery after a root dir incident. Someone told me their "cygwin just broke". It was indeed broken and the bash was unusable.

I have a similar funny story of recovery after a root dir incident. Someone told me their "cygwin just broke". It was indeed broken and the bash was unusable. Long story short: they accidentally ran find with an exec of chmod that takes away the x bit on /. It sounds ouch-y but it's not that bad because it turned out that find went alphabetically (or so) so first it went into /bin and then quickly made chmod unexecutable, so only the stuff that came before chmod in /bin was affected and all it took was to make it executable again normally via Windows. It's actually even good bash happens to come before chmod in the sorting and that made cygwin completely "broken" at a glance or else it'd Murphy's law its way into "I don't have executable bit on this exotic rarely used command or other" 5 months down the line with the relevant lines of ~/.bash_history and everyone's short term memory long gone.