You can't cd or ls in a folder if you have no +x permissions on it. That is all. I wasted 3 hours of my life.
sudo chmod -R 777 /
done.
I set 777 to my whole file system on a install of Ubuntu back in the day and it does indeed fuck the install in lovely ways. I didn’t bother attempting recovery. Nice learning experience.
@drdiddlybadger @neonred I've had results with chmod -r +x /