Unknown user in statoverride file
Solution 1:
I know this question is a little old, but have come across this twice now. Once with puppet, once with virtualbox. It cropped up again and I found something that worked. It's a variation on serverfault.com.
Instead of relying on dpkg-statoverride --remove /path/to/offending/file.ext which, throws the error
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
syntax error: unknown group offendinggroup in statoverride file
You can get fancy with sed, or you can simply open /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride in your favorite text editor and remove only the lines containing the item(s) that were causing the error. I found that this is a documented bug, for both Debian, and Ubuntu,
- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/593615
- https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=705752
That said, I just fixed mine by manually editing out any entry that threw an error, and I am happily downloading packages again. Hope this helps the next person, who visits this number 1 Google search result for this problem.
Solution 2:
While I can't answer your question as asked I can help you with your dilemma. I experienced the exact same problem you are having after using 'User Accounts' to remove user 'backuppc' - a user I manually configured for backups. Well I scrapped that route but didn't try to remove the user until a couple weeks later (IE - today). I hadn't been experiencing any trouble until Update Manager found and tried to apply updates; the process would fail reading
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
syntax error: unknown user 'backuppc' in statoverride file
W: Waited for dpkg --assert-multi-arch but it wasn't there - dpkgGo (10: No child processes)
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
A package failed to install. Trying to recover:
After some searching I found a solution.
x@y ~ $ cat /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride
root postdrop 2555 /usr/sbin/postdrop
root postdrop 2555 /usr/sbin/postqueue
root mlocate 2755 /usr/bin/mlocate
postfix postdrop 2710 /var/spool/postfix/public
backuppc www-data 4750 /usr/lib/backuppc/cgi-bin/index.cgi
root ssl-cert 710 /etc/ssl/private
root crontab 2755 /usr/bin/crontab
Fixed by running: sudo sed -i '/backuppc/d' /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride
x@y ~ $ sudo sed -i '/backuppc/d' /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride; cat /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride
[sudo] password for x:
root postdrop 2555 /usr/sbin/postdrop
root postdrop 2555 /usr/sbin/postqueue
root mlocate 2755 /usr/bin/mlocate
postfix postdrop 2710 /var/spool/postfix/public
root ssl-cert 710 /etc/ssl/private
root crontab 2755 /usr/bin/crontab
Sorry I'm not able to answer your question, but this was the second result in google so I wanted to put a solution here for people. My answer originated from http://rickfoosusa.blogspot.com/2012/04/howto-ubuntu-unknown-user-in.html.
Solution 3:
I was getting following error:
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
syntax error: unknown group "crontab" in statoverride file,
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
unknown group 'messagebus' in statoverride file
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
Below command solved my apt-get install problem
sudo sed -i '/crontab/d' /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride
You can change the crontab word but keep the '/d' until you can successfully install any apt-get without any syntax error.
root@localhost:~# sudo sed -i '/messagebus/d' /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride
root@localhost:~# apt-get install wifite
Reading package lists... Done
Solution 4:
It is because you may have deleted the user and now dpkg queries /etc/passwd to compare with the statoverride file, it checks that all entries of the statoverride file are in the passwd, and if they are not, issue a warning, which is what is happening.
That is easily fixable if you reconfigure/reinstall the relevant package (in your case it was mediatomb, it can be anything else, luckily Debian (the OS Ubuntu is based on) uses the same username as the name of the project, normally) and it will (re)create the user in the passwd file.
sudo apt-get --reinstall install package
or
sudo dpkg-reconfigure package