Recovering from removed libgcc_s.so.1 (and missing busybox)

I was experimenting in my arm chroot, and after a gcc upgrade and emerge --depclean --ask that removed the old gcc I got the following error:

# ls -l

ls: error while loading shared libraries: libgcc_s.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Fortunately the newer working gcc was present, so the steps to make things work again were:

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/lib/gcc/armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi/4.8.2/" gcc-config -l

 * gcc-config: Active gcc profile is invalid!

 [1] armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi-4.8.2

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/lib/gcc/armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi/4.8.2/" gcc-config 1 

 * Switching native-compiler to armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi-4.8.2 ...

Actually my first thought was using busybox. The unexpected breakage during a routine gcc upgrade made me do some research in case I can't rely on /bin/busybox being present and working.

I highly recommend the following links for further reading:
http://lambdaops.com/rm-rf-remains
http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/bashcp
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/27is0x/rm_rf_remains/ci199bk