-bash: /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/perl: No such file or directory - linux server kind of crashed

Question

My VPS Server (CPanel) got full so I decided to delete some files, namely the following

ssh root@server_ip_address

MB(space)      File Location
2583    /home/someuser/tmp/analog/cache       <-------------1
1883    /home/someuser/tmp/analog/cache.out   <-------------2
1061    /usr/tmpDSK <------------3

When I deleted the first two files it did free up some 4GB of space the disk was showing 85% occupied. Then I deleted the tmpDSK file (1.06GB) but it had no impact on disk size. After some half, an hour or so, our server crashed and it won't serve pages. It is up though and I can ping it but pages are not served.

What I noticed right away after I deleted tmpDSK, the user/local/ folder was missing (got deleted by mistake?) which contains Apache, Perl etc and hence the reason web sites are not being served.

Just now I logged in to the server via SSH and I got the following messages

-bash: /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/perl: No such file or directory
-bash: /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/perl: No such file or directory
-bash: /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/perl: No such file or directory

I am wondering, what possibly happened. Can I restore things myself, we do have a backup on the external drive ? Is there a way deleted files can be restored? I deleted them from sftp, one by one. There is already a ticket opened with the host provider, but I want to understand things myself better and see if I can restore it somehow. Note none of the Linux commands works on SSH, like ls etc. Also tmpDSK is supposed to be cPanel related where it store sessions, temporary files

Thanks

Answer 1

Answering myself

After more than 24 hours of troubleshooting with the host, and then personally researching we found the issue was very trivial.

We accidentally moved the contents of /usr/local/ folder to /usr/include which cause all the problems. Simply moving it back fixed the problem.

The content was moved unexpectedly when working with server with FTP (sftp). It likely had nothing to do with the three deleted files that I had deleted.