On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 11:44 +0100, Tony van der Hoff wrote: > Due to a combination of fiddling and finger-trouble I have contrived > to delete part of my /var partition. Unfortunately, I have never > thought to back up /var, being transient data... Big mistake! > > Anyway, the most pressing problem at the moment is that apt fails, > due to missing status data: > > E: Could not open file /var/lib/dpkg/status - open (2: No such file > or directory) > E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. > > How do I recover from this?
Uh, tough one. You can try the following which relies on the fact that every
package install documentation in /usr/share/doc/PKG and will reinstall all
those packages:
find /usr/share/doc -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -not -name texmf \
-not-name debian -printf 'install %f\n' \
| xargs aptitude --schedule-only reinstall; aptitude install;;
Unfortunately that also means that the information about
automatically/manually installed packages is lost.
There are certainlt other ways, but I like this one. I will think about how
you could get the manually/automatically installed information back.
--
.''`. Wolodja Wentland <babi...@gmail.com>
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