The Advanced Package Tool, or ‘apt’ on Debian-based systems is the mainstay for installing, upgrading and removing packages. Behind the various apt tools, the Debian package manager, dpkg, carries out the heavy lifting. You might wish to install new versions of packages periodically with the sequence:
- apt-get update
- apt-get upgrade
Recently, this and any other upgrade failed on Debian Lenny with:
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (100)
A quick look at /usr/bin/dpkg revealed the following!
---------- 1 root root 365324 2010-03-08 15:35 dpkg
A quick ‘chmod 755 /usr/bin/dpkg’ fixed the problem! I know I did not change the permissions, so it must have been a recent patch. Hopefully this gets fixed quickly!
June 12, 2010 at 20:15
“A quick ‘chmod 755 /usr/bin/dpkg’ fixed the problem! I know I did not change the permissions, so it must have been a recent patch. Hopefully this gets fixed quickly”
What exactly did you do?
June 13, 2010 at 21:36
From a terminal session, issue the command ‘chmod 755 /usr/bin/dpkg’ (as root, otherwise precede this with ‘sudo’).
December 17, 2010 at 05:28
A quick ‘chmod 755 /usr/bin/dpkg’ didn’t fixed the problem as you suggested. is there any other way to solve this problem ?
really i’m fed up with this issue.
February 11, 2011 at 14:17
I found the problem to be with the dpkg-dev package in Ubuntu. I removed the package completely and the problem did not re-occur
June 30, 2011 at 00:58
I delete the usr/bin/dpkg file and emptied the trash. How do I replace it?
June 3, 2011 at 04:41
However, I cd into /usr/bin and there’s no dpkg binary!!! Please help thanks
June 8, 2011 at 10:44
I’ve same problem … no dpkg file into /usr/bin …
June 6, 2013 at 14:53
Try purging the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list/ or /etc/apt/sources.list.d/