etc-update killed my box please help

[mogorman]

Okay I admit I am an idiot i didnt read the fuckin manual before i ran my first etc-updat, and selected auto merge. I had just intstalled gentoo a week ago on a fresh system so the etc-update didnt killl alot but it did mess up some things for me. first off it killed my fstab, but i fixed that in time , and then it killed my profile, but i put back in the paths that I needed, my big problem is it seems to have played with my file permissions? I couldnt use locate from my main user. it gives me the error
warning: locate: Could not find the group: slocate in the /etc/group file.
fatal error: This is a result of the group missing or a corrupted group file.

I checked the group file and everything seemed fine. then i ran groups on my user and got
id: cannot find name for group ID 100
100 id: cannot find name for group ID 10
10 id: cannot find name for group ID 11
11 id: cannot find name for group ID 18
18 id: cannot find name for group ID 19
19 id: cannot find name for group ID 27
27 id: cannot find name for group ID 35
35

however from root i get the correct results
syndicate : users wheel floppy audio cdrom video games

I fixed the locate problem by chmod 755 * in the /etc directory. What happened with the file permissions?

[rogue]

does your user still exist in the /etc/passwd file?
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(rob)

[mogorman]

yeah I fixed all the stuff i think by chmoding the etc files but my question is what happened and why im confused by the method.

[sgtrock]

I noticed after doing something similar that I had both a 'group' and a 'group-' file in /etc. It turned out that 'group-' was my original file. Do you have something similar on your system?

[pjp]

Moved from Installing Gentoo.
_________________
Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[xentric]

Just use the script in this post: Replacement for etc-update: cfg-update
for easy interactive merging of the new config files in a GUI diff tool
after a world update!