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I'm trying to recover from a faulty installation, and want to remove some packages. But I can't.
# apt autoremove offending-package
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
(My PATH is fine.)
According to packages.debian.org, start-stop-daemon should be in /sbin/.
It isn't there! What should I do?
My solution was to download the dpkg binary and install start-stop-daemon by hand.
# apt download dpkg
# sudo ar -x dpkg_version-info.deb
# tar -xzf data.tar.gz
# mv ./sbin/start-stop-daemon /sbin
Now everything works, but I'm still stumped how it went missing!
start-stop-daemon is part of dpkg, no package, systemd-related or not, could cause its removal. You can also use sysvinit on Debian 9 if you don’t like systemd, no need to switch to Devuan (but anyone wishing to do so is of course welcome to).
May 27, 2018 at 14:13
dpkg-deb --extract dpkg_version-info.deb /tmp/dpkg to extract the files into /tmp/dpkg
Another way to do this is first create a dummy /usr/local/sbin/start-stop-daemon that does nothing:
#!/bin/sh exec truethen simply reinstall the dpkg package:
aptitude reinstall dpkgthen (of course) remove the dummy
/usr/local/sbin/start-stop-daemon.
Installing the dpkg package does not in fact require start-stop-daemon at any point. It is simply the case that the dpkg command, that is run to reinstall its own package, checks that start-stop-daemon is on the command search path in case a package installation/deinstallation script happens to use it.
