Gilles wrote: > dpkg --get-selections | perl -ane 'print $F[0], " " if $F[1] =~ /^install/' > SELECT [...] > and press enter... > [Note/WARNING: I did not test this!] I've done something very similar to repair a system after filesytem corruption. It worked quite well. But if ownership is screwy, dpkg may have problems running. I'm also not sure that this will fix /etc since dpkg tends to want to keep user changes there. Can you boot into Knoppix (or similar) and start chowning files back to root? Note that not all files should be root:root; on my laptop: # find /etc -not -user root -or -not -group root [I've annotated the output to include the users and groups of things] /etc/ppp/peers /etc/ppp/peers/anu /etc/ppp/peers/snap [... more ppp peers - these are all root:dip ...] /etc/ppp/ppp_on_boot.dsl /etc/bind /etc/bind/.... [more files here, mostly root:bind] /etc/cups /etc/cups/ppd /etc/cups/ppd/* [all files here are root:lpadmin] /etc/cups/classes.conf /etc/cups/classes.conf.O /etc/cups/classes.conf.dpkg-dist /etc/cups/cupsd.conf /etc/cups/printers.conf /etc/cups/printers.conf.O /etc/cups/printers.conf.dpkg-dist /etc/exim4/passwd.client [root:Debian-exim] /etc/chatscripts /etc/chatscripts/provider [root:dip] /etc/shadow [root:shadow] /etc/gshadow [root:shadow] /etc/at.deny [root:daemon] There are a bunch of files in /var with non-root:root ownership too. Did you interrupt chown before it got to /var or would a list there also be useful? Obviously the list of what things are not root:root depends on what packages you have installed but hopefully this should be a fairly typical desktopish system. Cameron
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