debian utility question

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@shellworld.net>]

Does debian have a utility I can run to check and repair disk permissions? 
On a mac under applications and utilities and under disk repair utility 
there's a function for repair disk permissions which can check permissions 
against a known default set and repair if necessary.  It could be the 
problems I'm having with dpkg may be because some permissions somewhere 
aren't set right.