debian and its derivatives (and probably most other distributions) come with busybox which is used in the initramfs .

busybox bundles most core command line utilities in a single executable.

You can temporarily symlink /bin/rm to /bin/busybox :

ln -s busybox /bin/rm

To get a working rm (after which you can do your apt-get install --reinstall coreutils ).

That same method can be used for all the other utilities that busybox includes. That list varies from one deployment to another. You can get the list with busybox --list .

Note however that they are limited versions of the corresponding utilities. They sometimes support GNU extensions, but generally not and some of them will not even support all the standard/POSIX features (some features can be enabled/disabled at compile time).

Alternatively, you could use zsh 's builtin rm:

#! /bin/zsh zmodload zsh/files rm "$@"

The zsh/files module provides with a few additional builtin commands ( rm , mv , ln , mkdir , rmdir , chown , chmod , sync ). It's useful in this kind of situation or when you cannot fork more processes but do have an interactive zsh running.

ksh93 also has a number of extra/optional commands buitin, but not rm among them ( basename , chmod , dirname , getconf , head , mkdir , logname , cat , cmp , cut , uname , wc , sync ). You can invoke them with:

command /opt/ast/bin/the-command