ldconfig Not Found

Question

My system is messed up and I dont understand whats going on. Whenever I try to install any package, it tells me to run "sudo apt-get -f install" . I guess this is because I tried to install some package without its dependencies. And when I run that command, it say ldconfig not found. I dont know why it says so. I get the following error.

dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable. dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable. Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.

When I try to locate ldconfig, I see it as folder only in var/cache/. Path is set as follows.

anup@ubuntu:~$ echo $PATH /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/var/cache

Please suggest!

Solution

Well, there're a few possible steps for recover.

Manually unpack the content of libc-bin package. The package can be downloaded from here http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/e/eglibc/ and you should choose a version suitable for your Ubuntu version. Please consult the following page http://packages.ubuntu.com/saucy/libc-bin and see what version you need.

To unpack you may use ar and tar utilities:

    mkdir /tmp/a_new_directory; cd /tmp/a_new_directory
    ar x /path/to/libc-bin-<version>.deb data.tar.gz
    tar zxf data.tar.gz

Then you need the unpacked copy of ldconfig to /sbin/. Also you probably need other files from the archive, check what you currently have in your hard drive.

After you restore the basic functionality of your installation, I would recommend to re-install all the packages from the base system, those marked as essential :)