cleanlinks breaks xterm and apt

[easter@sccs.swarthmore.edu (Hollis Easter)]

Hi there,

I'm having some strange problems in light of an apparently stupid
maintenance action I took this afternoon. I've been getting emails to
root from cron saying that I have dangling symlinks in the man tree[1],
  and so I thought I should get rid of them. I wasn't sure if I needed
  to just delete them or do something else, and so I asked man. It
  directed me to cleanlinks (1x), which I ran as root from / . I had
  first checked out cleanlinks on Google to see if there was advice
  about not using it as root or anything, but found nothing.

This was apparently a bad idea, as it turns out that there are about a
million dangling symlinks in subdirectories of /. Many of them have been
removed, but after I saw the huge number of filenames scrolling past my
screen, I killed cleanlinks with Ctrl-C. I had hoped that nothing bad
would happen, but it did.

The first thing I noticed was that xterm no longer works. Indeed, `which
xterm` gives no result. I thought I would reinstall it, to make sure
that everything is fine.

So I updated my apt cache, and then did apt-get install xterm[2], which
says xterm is already the current version and then gives a lot of errors
which look to be Perl-related. I tried installing a package that wasn't
already installed (xdesktopwaves, randomly), and got the same errors.

I am now in way over my head, and my system appears to be breaking. I've
exhausted the options I could think of for fixing the problems. There
may well be others that I haven't found yet.

I'd be most grateful if anyone could point me toward a way to fix this,
  or even to find out what else has been broken. Before you ask, there
  are no backups. The new USB external drive I bought for the purpose
  wouldn't talk to my system, and I was in the middle of trying to get
  it to work when I got the cron email and thought I would take care of
  it.

As they say, fate is not without a sense of irony.

Thanks for all your help,
  Hollis Easter


[1] i.e.:
/etc/cron.daily/man-db:
mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/ctags.1.gz is a dangling symlink
mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/etags.1.gz is a dangling symlink
mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/emacs.1.gz is a dangling symlink

[2] 
tamias:/# apt-get install xterm
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
xterm is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.
debconf: Perl may be unconfigured (Can't locate strict.pm in @INC (@INC
      contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.4
      /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.4 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5
      /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl
      /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.3 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.3 .) at (eval
        1) line 2.
    BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 2.
    ) -- aborting
Setting up xterm (4.3.0.dfsg.1-10) ...
Can't locate File/Basename.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl
    /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.4 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.4 /usr/lib/perl5
    /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8
    /usr/local/lib/site_perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.3
    /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.3 .) at /usr/sbin/install-docs line 19.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/sbin/install-docs line 19.
dpkg: error processing xterm (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
 Errors were encountered while processing:
  xterm
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
  

-------------------------------------------
Hollis Easter      easter@sccs.swarthmore.edu