And now I am unable to chmod it back.. or use any of my other system programs. Luckily this is on a VM I've been toying with, but is there any way to resolve this? The system is Ubuntu Server 12.10. I have attempted to restart into recovery mode, unfortunately now I am unable to boot into the system at all due to permissions not granting some programs after init-bottom availability to run- the system just hangs. This is what I see:Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom ... done[   37.062059] init: Failed to spawn friendly-recovery pre-start process: unable to execute: Permission denied[   37.084744]  init: Failed to spawn friendly-recovery post-stop process: unable to execute: Permission denied[   37.101333] init: plymouth main process (220) killed by ABRT signalAfter this the computer hangs. 
How to recover from a chmod -R 000 /bin?
permissions;executable;chmod;system recovery
Boot another clean OS, mount the file system and fix permissions.As your broken file system lives in a VM, you should have your host system available and working. Mount your broken file system there and fix it.In case of QEMU/KVM you can for example mount the file system using nbd.