Errors were encountered while processing: man-db

I get this error when I use apt-get upgrade & apt-get autoremove and on every apt-get [Something].. and when I try to install applications too:

Errors were encountered while processing:
man-db
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

3

6 Answers

No solution mentioned in the answers worked for me and I tried a solution mentioned here on Ubuntu Forums, executing the command

sudo dpkg -i --force-all [deb file path]

and that worked.

6

Please read the comments below. This may be a dangerous command to run on your system and create an unrecoverable state. (the lines have been commented out to prevent copy-and-paste sysadmin'ing).

---

Simple and working i tried it !!

sudo -s
# cd /var/cache/debconf
# rm *.dat
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Enjoy ;)

6

You may also want to know that you can use dpkg --audit to see what the actual problem is.

If the output is something like:

The following packages are in a mess due to serious problems during installation.
They must be reinstalled for them (and any packages that depend on them)
to function properly: gcdemu A GNOME panel applet to control CDEmu daemon
The following packages have been unpacked but not yet configured.
They must be configured using dpkg --configure or the configure
menu option in dselect for them to work: cdemu-daemon CDEmu daemon cdemu-client A simple command-line client to control CDEmu daemon
The following packages are only half configured, probably due to problems
configuring them the first time. The configuration should be retried using
dpkg --configure <package> or the configure menu option in dselect: transmission-daemon lightweight BitTorrent client (daemon) vhba-dkms VHBA virtual host bus adapter module

You could run the command: dpkg --configure <packagename>

 dpkg --configure cdemu-daemon

In order to

Reconfigure an unpacked package.
If -a or --pending is given instead of package, all unpacked but unconfigured
packages are configured.

Furthermore you could use:

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get --reinstall install gcdemu

To fix the packages that are in a mess.

Examples from here:

3

community wiki answer - solved by OP

This problem was resolved by running the following terminal command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a

2

You have to run those commands with sudo preceding them so they can be executed with super user credentials Example:

sudo apt-get autoremove "NAME OF PACKAGE HERE"

2

If you have deleted /var/cache in a misguided attempt to clean up (like I did), this might fix the issue (it did for me):

sudo mkdir /var/cache/debconf