Quoting Niels Thykier (niels@thykier.net):
FTR; I don't think that "apt-get check" is supposed to work as non-root.- If it fails, please attempt to figure out where the permission fails (e.g. [dir-test])# ls -ld / /var /var/lib /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg/status drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 1024 Jul 10 11:21 / drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 May 7 2013 /var drwxr-xr-x 74 root root 4096 Jul 7 16:01 /var/lib drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Jul 11 08:48 /var/lib/dpkg -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1961225 Jul 11 08:48 /var/lib/dpkg/status As you can see, none of these are writable by _apt; however, these are the same permissions I see on the other (working)Indeed, and _apt does not need write access to the status file. Does it work if you disable the sandbox user, e.g. by using: apt-get -o APT::Sandbox::User=root update
No, same error: # apt-get -o APT::Sandbox::User=root update Get:1 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates InRelease [62.9 kB] Get:2 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch-updates InRelease [88.5 kB] Ign:3 http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch InRelease Hit:4 http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch Release Fetched 151 kB in 1s (81.1 kB/s) Reading package lists... Error! E: flAbsPath on /var/lib/dpkg/status failed - realpath (22: Invalid argument) E: Could not open file - open (2: No such file or directory) E: Problem opening E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. -- Alan Schwartz The Michael Reese Endowed Professor of Medical Education Associate Head, UIC Department of Medical Education Research Professor, UIC Department of Pediatrics alansz@uic.edu | http://ulan.mede.uic.edu/alansz | PGP: 0x062556CF