Debian/Ubuntu - How to restore /var/cache/apt structure after deleting it?

Question

I was running out of space on an Ubuntu server, so I did this command to save space

sudo rm -rf /var/cache/apt/archives

However now when trying to do things with apt, I get the following errors:

E: Could not open lock file /var/cache/apt/archives/lock - open (2 No such file or directory)

E: Unable to lock the download directory

And things like

Archive directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial is missing.

Clearly I have removed some directory structure. Is there some way to do a apt-get rebuild-var-tree or similar?

Solution 1

You need two things there:

sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
sudo touch /var/cache/apt/archives/lock
sudo chmod 640 /var/cache/apt/archives/lock

Removing this directory manually is a bad idea generally. To clean archives cleanly, use:

sudo apt-get clean

Solution 2

For fresh APT versions, full solution looks like:

sudo mkdir -m 0700 /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
sudo chown _apt:root /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

Comments

[hey]

not a 'proper' answer so it'll need to be a comment but next time you could try apt-get autoclean (or possibly apt-get clean)

[mlebrun]

Under debian, I think we should not use sudo. simply use: mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/partial touch /var/cache/apt/archives/lock chmod 640 /var/cache/apt/archives/lock

[Matt Ryall]

In Buster, apt can set up its own directory structure if you just create the root directory: sudo mkdir -p /var/cache/apt.