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Re: Where's /bin/kill ?



On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 10:56:13PM +0000, Adrian Bridgett wrote:
> Does anyone know why? Neither changelog mention it.

Salutations,

Did you, by any chance, do a dpkg -i --force-overwrite over the past few
months? I remember some other package other then bsdutils was also providing
/bin/kill a few months ago. I think it was bash. Anyway, a new release soon 
followed which excluded that file (in order to fix the file conflict)... 

When dpkg installed that new package, it deleted the old, bugged one first
(which included /bin/kill since that package listed it as one of the files it
"owned"). The newer package was then installed. But this one didn't provide 
/bin/kill (since that file actually belonged to another package so the
maintainer left it out in the new release).

dpkg won't know /bin/kill was also owned by bsdutils. As far as it knows, no
packages can share the same file... therefore, it never bothers checking if
the file it is about to unlink is owned by another package.

So in the end, you end up without a /bin/kill.

Re-installing bsdutils should fix the problem. Just make sure you don't use
--force-overwrite so quickly next time :)

This is my guess as to what happened. My understanding on this stuff is rather
shallow. Forgive me if there are inaccuracies... please correct them if you
spot them :)

Ah well, back to downloading my 120 MB of packages... :(

Farewell,
Steven Wong


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