Removing broken packages in Ubuntu [closed]

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I faced this problem with a broken package, rvm. I tried many things like sudo apt install -f and sudo dpkg --purge --force-all rvm but nothing worked. Finally I managed to find a blog post that explains how to remove broken packages on Debian/Ubuntu.

Here are the steps.

  1. Find your package in /var/lib/dpkg/info, for example using: ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/info | grep <package>

  2. Move the package folder to another location, like suggested in the blog post I mentioned before.

     sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.* /tmp/

  3. Run the following command:

     sudo dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq <package>

So as an example I solved my problem by executing the following commands in a terminal:

sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/rvm.* /tmp/
sudo dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq rvm

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