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pcalvert

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 215  

[SOLVED] Strange aptitude error: "...ifstream (13: Permission denied)"

OS: Devuan ASCII

Error messages:

$ aptitude install gtk2-engines -s
E: Opening /etc/apt/sources.list - ifstream::ifstream (13: Permission denied)
E: Opening /etc/apt/sources.list - ifstream::ifstream (13: Permission denied)
E: The list of sources could not be read.

$ aptitude search gtk2-engines
E: Opening /etc/apt/sources.list - ifstream::ifstream (13: Permission denied)
E: Opening /etc/apt/sources.list - ifstream::ifstream (13: Permission denied)
E: The list of sources could not be read.

This appears to be the reason:

-rwxrwx--- 1 root root  227 Apr 22 00:56 sources.list

(Something changed the permissions for sources.list.)

An older copy of the file has the correct permissions:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 336 Jun 29  2017 sources.list

This corrected the problem:

# chmod 644 /etc/apt/sources.list

This is the last operation performed before discovery of the error:

# aptitude upgrade
The following packages will be upgraded: 
  base-files clearlooks-phenix-darkpurpy-theme curl google-chrome-stable 
  libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls libpcsclite1 libpolkit-agent-1-0 
  libpolkit-backend-1-0 libpolkit-backend-consolekit-1-0 
  libpolkit-gobject-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-consolekit-1-0 libprocps6 
  policykit-1 procps tasksel tasksel-data xdg-utils 
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
  gtk2-engines laptop-detect libfile-mimeinfo-perl libnet-dbus-perl 
  libx11-protocol-perl 
18 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 54.4 MB of archives. After unpacking 722 kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

Perhaps one of those packages is the culprit?

Phil

Last edited by pcalvert (2018-06-07 09:24:24)

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devuser

Member

Registered: 2018-04-30

Posts: 176  

Re: [SOLVED] Strange aptitude error: "...ifstream (13: Permission denied)"

Well, i am as surprised as you are. According to apt-file there are no packages containing /etc/apt/sources.list and i have checked the (imo) most likely packages to have something to do with apt (base-files, tasksel, tasksel-data) for postinst scripts changing permissions on sources.list but found nothing obvious.

pcalvert

Member

Registered: 2017-05-15

Posts: 215  

Re: [SOLVED] Strange aptitude error: "...ifstream (13: Permission denied)"

Hi devuser,

Thank you for your efforts to try to determine possible causes for this error. Your reply prompted me to think more intensively about other possible causes for the error message, so it was definitely helpful.

I found the culprit: VirtualBox. I recently upgraded a Debian Stretch VM to Devuan ASCII. I created the new sources.list on the host system, and copied it to the guest via a shared directory. That's how the permissions got changed. Oddly enough, when I copied a test file from the guest to the host, via the same shared directory, the permissions were not changed. From now on, I'll have to remember to tar or zip files before copying them to guest systems.

Phil

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devuser

Member

Registered: 2018-04-30

Posts: 176  

Re: [SOLVED] Strange aptitude error: "...ifstream (13: Permission denied)"

Glad to hear you figured it out. I was almost about to ask if a FAT formated thumb drive might have played a role but iirc files stored on those end up with 0755 permissions so i ruled that out. Still kinda strange that aptitude choked on this. Sure the execute bits are silly but i don't see why they should yield a fatal error.