File size limit exceeded

[Miguel Obliviemo <miggle@view.net.au>]

I have a problem with Postfix not working but manual SMTP works.  So
I'm at the point of uninstalling and reinstalling Postfix the Debian
way and can't do a thing because of this error.

"File size limit exceeded"

I've seen the message in other contexts.  I forget the details, but
just walking away, switching to another user and doing something else,
is as far as I've got.

Now it says run dpkg --configure -a

but when I do that it aborts with this message.

There's nothing relevant immediately after in /var/log/syslog or
/var/log/messages.

I.e. totally baffled.

The following outpout starts halfway through the apt-get message flow
on attempting apt-get remove postfix:

  debian-keyring libtest-pod-perl libmail-box-perl dctrl-tools dput
  debian-maintainers libpod-coverage-perl html2text
  libobject-realize-later-perl libuser-identity-perl
  libnet-libidn-perl
  libconvert-binhex-perl libmail-sendmail-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl
  libossp-uuid15 libsys-hostname-long-perl libdigest-hmac-perl
  libparse-debcontrol-perl wdiff
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  at bsd-mailx postfix
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 3805kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
(Reading database ... 127685 files and directories currently
  installed.)
Removing at ...
Stopping deferred execution scheduler: atd.
Removing bsd-mailx ...
Removing postfix ...
Stopping Postfix Mail Transport Agent: postfix.
Processing triggers for man-db ...
/var/lib/dpkg/info/man-db.postinst: line 3:  6289 File size limit
  exceededperl -e '@pwd = getpwnam("man"); $( = $) = $pwd[3]; $< = $>
  = $pwd[2];
             exec "/usr/bin/mandb", @ARGV' -- "$@"
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg exited unexpectedly
so-called:/etc#
so-called:/etc# apt-get purge postfix
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a'
  to correct
the problem.
so-called:/etc#
so-called:/etc# dpkg --configure -a
File size limit exceeded
so-called:/etc#

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4410 2009-01-25 13:38 man-db.postinst


so-called:/var/lib/dpkg/info# apt-get remove man-db
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem. 
so-called:/var/lib/dpkg/info# dkpkg --configure -a
File size limit exceeded
so-called:/var/lib/dpkg/info# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             15377852   9970276   4626416  69% /
tmpfs                   900480         0    900480   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                     10240       152     10088   2% /dev
tmpfs                   900480         0    900480   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda12            15385852  13354824   1249468  92% /u2
/dev/sda13            15385852    604776  13999516   5% /u3
/dev/sdb1              3866116    986428   2683296  27% /mnt
/dev/scd0              4586566   4586566         0 100% /media/cdrom0
so-called:/var/lib/dpkg/info#


--
Miguel