Debian 5.0 No such file or directory problem

Question

oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l

oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# uname -a
Linux oracle1 2.6.26-2-686 #1 SMP Wed Nov 4 20:45:37 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# whoami
root
oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0#
=============================================
oracle1:/tmp# cd /tmp
oracle1:/tmp# touch exfile
oracle1:/tmp# cat exfile
cat: /tmp/exfile: No such file or directory
oracle1:/tmp# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2011-04-08 21:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2011-04-08 21:38 ..
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 2009-11-20 09:19 .ICE-unix
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 2009-11-20 09:19 .X11-unix
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 2011-04-08 21:38 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 2011-04-08 21:38 exfile
oracle1:/tmp# cat a
cat: /tmp/a: No such file or directory
oracle1:/tmp# cat exfile
cat: /tmp/exfile: No such file or directory

after I installed the build-essential package I get this error on every directory ... anyone knows why ?

+++++++

oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# ls -al
....
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   379 2009-11-06 12:15 utf8.pm
....
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  4990 2009-11-06 12:15 fields.pm
....
oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# pwd
/usr/share/perl/5.10.0
oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# cat utf8.pm
cat: /usr/share/perl/5.10.0/utf8.pm: No such file or directory
oracle1:/usr/share/perl/5.10.0# cat fields.pm
cat: /usr/share/perl/5.10.0/fields.pm: No such file or directory

Answer 1

It's strange, but cat may have moved. I would try:

hash -r

in your current shell, and see if cat works again.

That command will dump the cache of program locations that Bash keeps. See man bash for more info.