Broken /var filesystem
I found a huge problem with my /var filesystem. Or, at least, fsck was
going to take all day and more fixing 11 inode block numbers each pass.
It's supposed to be possible to clean /var, or at least FHS suggests
so. And it was messing me up horribly anyway. So, I re-initialized /var.
One of the things that vanished, of course, is dpkg/apt's memory of what
is installed. Right now, dpkg doesn't think dpkg is installed!
Everything runs, until it needs to refer to the database.
I googled around, and found some similar reports. The proposed cure
involved installing 'mawk' and 'dpkg' with '--force-depends.' Then I
should be able to re-install libc6, on which nearly everything depends.
However, before I can get to that point, I get " unable to create
updated files list file for package mawk: No such file or directory".
So, it looks as though I need to manually re-create at least one more
directory.
I checked the "contents.gz" files, but they only mention files that are
actually present in the tarball, not those created by the installation
scripts. I think, if I can get past this, I can get dpkg to re-install
itself and that will cure whatever other things are destroyed.
Can anyone identify what directories and files dpkg requires to exist?
TIA
--
David A. Cobb, Software Engineer, Public Access Advocate
"By God's Grace, I am a Christian man; by my actions a great sinner." -- The Way of a Pilgrim: R.French, Tr.
Free at last! Free at last! Using Linux, I'm FREE at last!
Life is too short to tolerate crappy software!
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