battery died and interrupted update (my solution)

[nmz787]

so my battery died while the update manager was processing updates.

first i copied /var/log/dpkg.log to my working directory


sudo cp /var/log/dpkg.log ./

then i sorted this list according to the date i did the updates on


cat dpkg.log | grep 12-10 > newfile.file

then i wrote this perl script to parse through newfile.file stripping the everything but the package name, and print the list to the screen.

in my case i wanted to reinstall everything on this list, with some exceptions (i commented these areas in the script), so I piped the list to apt-get


sudo apt-get install --reinstall `perl sortDpkg.pl`


it took me a while to get it to work, I had to purge some apache packages manually

sudo dpkg --purge package-name

these are also helpful if your system packages are out of order:

to reconfigure the last install (if the config step died)

sudo dpkg --configure -a

try to have apt-get fix itself after a crash/issue:

sudo apt-get install -f




#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
#open the file newfile.file (you can change this to whatever you filename is)
open(MYINPUTFILE, "<newfile.file");

my @pkgArray = ();
my $firstTime=1;

#loop through every line in the file and parse the package name out of it
while (<MYINPUTFILE>){
my($line) = $_;
chomp($line);
my $newIndex=rindex($line, "installed");
my $newli = substr $line, $newIndex + 10;
$line = substr $newli,0, index($newli, " ")+1;

my $noDuplicate = 1;
#go through the list to see if there are duplicate entries
for (my $i = 0; $i < scalar(@pkgArray); $i++) {
if ( @pkgArray[$i] eq $line ) {
$noDuplicate = 0;
}
}
#if there are no duplicates proceed to push a package from the file into the list
if ( $noDuplicate ) {
#check to make sure "installed" was found in the parsed line, if not value will be -1
#this is because the package name follows "installed" in the string
if ($newIndex>=0) {
#remove or add packages and exceptions (for things like version conflicts)
if ($line eq "package-name-to disclude " | $line eq ""){
} else {
#these are examples of when the list had packages that apt-get told me needed to be newer versions
if ($line eq "libgail18 ") {
push(@pkgArray,"libgtk2.0-0 ");
} elsif ($line eq "libgmime-2.0-2 ") {
push(@pkgArray, "libgmime-2.0-2a ");
} else {
#if there are no exceptions, this is the main line for building the list
push(@pkgArray, "$line");
}
}
}
}
}

#print each element in the package list, with a newline character for readability, etc...
foreach (@pkgArray){
print($_,"\n");
}