Apt not working due to lack of libstdc++ after Debian upgrade : "`GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by apt-get)"

Question

I was trying to perform upgrade from Debian 6 to 7.11 (wheezy). I've changed sources.list to:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main



deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib non-free

deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main



deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main



deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free

And started by apt-get update, then apt-get upgrade and finally apt-get dist-upgrade

After all these steps I've got in file /etc/debian_version value 7.11 but I can't do nothing using apt because of following error:

root@server:~# apt-get dist-upgrade

apt-get: /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by apt-get)

apt-get: /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libapt-pkg.so.4.12)



root@server:~# apt-get update

apt-get: /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by apt-get)

apt-get: /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libapt-pkg.so.4.12)

Answer 1

You have a copy of libstdc++.so.6 in /usr/local/lib which is being used in preference to the system’s copy (in /usr/lib or one of its sub-directories). To get apt working again, you need to delete it or at least rename it:

sudo mv /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6{,.old}

You should also rename the file libstdc++.so.6 points to; after doing the above, run:

tgt=$(readlink /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.so.6.old)
sudo mv "/usr/local/lib/${tgt}"{,.old}