An apt-get problem today

[Derek Broughton]

Luca wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:59 PM, Derek Broughton
> <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>> I think though that you _will_ find there are files with gid=999, and
>> a
>> lot of them too.  So you can run "chgrp -h 0" on them yourself (that
>> says "change the group to root, without dereferencing symlinks").
> 
> I'm not sure again of what you suggest in your replying...
> 
> With the command
> 
> sudo find -L $NINER_NINER_PATHS -gid 999 -print0 | xargs -0rt chgrp 0

You don't really think that will just work, do you?  $NINER_NINER_PATHS 
would have to actually have _some_ value... and you'll need to look at 
the postinst script to figure out what it should be.
 
> I find """A LOT""" of messages like this; it seems that are all (or
> many of them) in the .wine directory.
> 
> find: Symbolic link
> `./.wine/dosdevices/z:/sys/devices/platform/pcspkr/subsystem/devices/i8042/serio0/subsystem/devices/serio1/input/input4/subsystem/input8/device/device:22/subsystem/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0A03:00/PNP0C0F:04/driver/PNP0C0F:03/driver'
> is part of a loop in the directory hierarchy; we have already visited

Well, there you go.  That's why I said I think you probably should be 
fixing your filesystem.  You've got a "find" command stuck in a loop, no 
wonder it's passing too many files to xargs.  It would be good to find out why that link is cyclic and break it.

It's about 95% likely that just removing those lines from the script, 
and running "sudo dpkg --configure -a" will work (at least, iirc, that 
runs the postinst script).  But there's a small chance that you really 
_do_ have something with an invalid gid.
-- 
derek