Re: /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives: FIXED
On Wed, 13 Nov 2002 22:44:38 -0500, Jerome Acks Jr
<jracksjr@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 04:21:59AM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
>> Well I've got round my ldconfig problems. Eventually I found
>> base2_1.tgz on my Debian CD, unzipped it on my Windoze box, wrote it
>> to a CD, and copied stuff in using the rescue disk. With the addition
>> of some of the rescue disk itself (fsck) I got an ldconfig, and got it
>> to boot again, after several false starts. I then used dpkg -i to
>> reinstall most of the stuff in main/binary-i386/base which got most
>> stuff working, including dselect.
>>
>> I'm now using dselect to reinstall pretty much everything and get the
>> system back into a consistent state. I have got a few errors on some
>> packages due to /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/foo being corrupt. (eg. foo
>> = awk)
>>
>> Is it permissible simply to delete these files? Will I risk breaking
>> the whole thing again? If so, how do I restore them?
>
>See man update-alternatives to see how you would normally modify files
>in /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives. I am not sure if anything would break
>if you just delete the files.
Ah, the old Linux game, guess the name of the man page :-)
>The files in /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives are ascii text, so you could edit
>them with vi, emacs, bvi, or any text editor. I would suggest bvi or
>ghex so you can see what nonprintable are in the files.
>
>Here is a couple of examples (vi & emacs) of what files in
>/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives look like. These would be different on you
>computer depending on what packages you have installed.
><snip>
>I hope this helps.
Yeah, it did. Thanks! The format of the entries was OK, and the files
looked normal when catted. Viewing unprintables revealed the presence
of Microsoft LF/CR line breaks...
>> I found base2_1.tgz on my Debian CD, unzipped it on my Windoze box,
>>wrote it to a CD, and copied stuff in using the rescue disk.
...WinZip had oh-so-helpfully inserted CRs into every single text
file. Curiously, this only actually broke a few of them, so I thought
it was an isolated phenomenon until I scanned the whole of the
LoseZip-unzipped base2_1.tgz and found about 500 files. AARGH! Moral:
Never forget that Windoze software does stupid things without telling
you.
Thanks again,
Pigeon
C:\WINDOWS>ren win.com lose.com
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