Debian – How to Reinstall Packages After File Corruption

debianpackage-management

After an unclean shutdown, fsck reported corruption in several parts of the filesystem, apparently affecting installed packages (luckily no user data was affected).

Is there an easy way how I can reinstall these packages from scratch, e.g. tell apt or dpkg to install the same package again, without changing its flags (especially preserving the auto-installed flag)?

I have a list of the affected files and, with some effort, could figure out which packages I would need to reinstall. Alternative is to reinstall everything installed on the system.

Best Answer

For each of your corrupted file, the package that installed your file can be obtained with:

dpkg -S /full/path/of/the/corrupted/file

You can then reinstall it with the command:

apt-get --reinstall install package

If all your corrupted files are in a single file list.txt, then you can obtain all the associated packages with:

dpkg -S $(cat list.txt) | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u

And of course install all those packages with that single command:

apt-get --reinstall install $(dpkg -S $(cat list.txt) | cut -d: -f1 | sort -u)

Related Solutions

How to Reinstall All Debian Packages

Try this, remembering that I did not test it:

dpkg --get-selections > selections
sudo dpkg --clear-selections
sudo dpkg --set-selections < selections
sudo apt-get --reinstall dselect-upgrade

Sources:

How to reinstall configuration file

You should mv the file out of the way:

mv /etc/bluetooth/main.conf /etc/bluetooth/main.conf.old
apt-get -o DPkg::options::=--force-confmiss --reinstall install bluez

I don't know if you can get apt to overwrite an existing config file, that's why you should move it out of the way first.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to Reinstall All Debian Packages

How to reinstall configuration file

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