Why no "ls" on DVD or livefs.iso?

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 10 Oct 2013, W. D. wrote:

> At 08:47 10/6/2013, Warren Block wrote:
>> On Sun, 6 Oct 2013, W. D. wrote:
>>
>>> Booted with both.  Alt-F4 to get to command line.
>>>
>>> Very limited commands: "ls: not found".
>>>
>>> Why?  What good are these disks if they don't have
>>> the most basic of commands?
>>
>> The "emergency holographic shell" was always very limited.  I suspect a
>> path thing, with it looking for commands on the installed system.  Old
>> bare-bones tricks like "echo *" help.
>>
>>> Trying to clone a hard disk that has an number
>>> of bad sectors.  Trying to save most of my data.
>>>
>>> Want to use "recoverdisk", but can't get the
>>> command line to work.
>>
>> Use mfsBSD: http://mfsbsd.vx.sk/
>
> Thanks, Warren.  MFSBSD worked for me.
>
> Had to use 8.X because 9.X hangs.  I think it has something
> to do with my PS2 mouse and keyboard.  9.X still only seems
> to work with USB peripherals--or is something else going on?
>
> I was a bit skittish using "recoverdisk" because I couldn't
> find any explicit notation about source and target.
>
>    # clone a hard disk
>     recoverdisk /dev/ad3 /dev/ad4
>
> As it turns out, the first argument is the source and the
> second is the target, as one might intuitively guess.  However,
> I've been burned before by guesses, so I hope someone will
> update the man pages to make this obvious.

It says

      recoverdisk [-b bigsize] [-r readlist] [-s interval] [-w writelist]
                  source [destination]

That seems pretty clear, although the text does not really explain what 
happens if the optional destination is not given.  Output to stdout 
would be the standard expectation.