Any way to re-install packages?

[Joe Emenaker]

I had a hard drive go wiggy on me yesterday.   It didn't crash completely... it merely started giving read errors and causing all kinds of filesystem wierdness (like things in /usr/bin that you can't run because they're "not found", but you can't install a replacement because "file exists"). What fun!   I've got everything moved to a new drive, but now I've got some missing and/or corrupted binaries on the system. Up to this point, this is how I have to cope:   1 - Use the system until I see some "not found" error... like for /usr/bin/tail or mkinitrd or something. 2 - grep in /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list to find what package it's in. 3 - ftp to a mirror to get that package again 4 - install with "dpkg --install ...."   I've had to do this for several kernel images, sysvinit, textutils, fileutils, grep, man, mawk.... lots of basic stuff. Who knows what else is screwed up.....   Now, it would be nice if there were something like "apt-get reinstall" that would save steps 3 and 4. What would be better is something that would download/install all installed packages of a given category... like "essential" or "important". Even if it was only useful in situations like this, I think that it would be justified.... but there are several other uses as well (like recovering from a possible rootkit attack... where you're not sure that you trust your core binaries).   - Joe