Errors were encountered while processing: man-db

I get this error when I use apt-get upgrade & apt-get autoremove and on every apt-get [Something].. and when I try to install applications too:

Errors were encountered while processing: man-db E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) 

6 Answers

No solution mentioned in the answers worked for me and I tried a solution mentioned here on Ubuntu Forums, executing the command

sudo dpkg -i --force-all [deb file path] 

and that worked.

Please read the comments below. This may be a dangerous command to run on your system and create an unrecoverable state. (the lines have been commented out to prevent copy-and-paste sysadmin'ing).

Simple and working i tried it !!

sudo -s # cd /var/cache/debconf # rm *.dat apt-get update && apt-get upgrade 

Enjoy ;)

You may also want to know that you can use dpkg --audit to see what the actual problem is.

If the output is something like:

The following packages are in a mess due to serious problems during installation. They must be reinstalled for them (and any packages that depend on them) to function properly: gcdemu A GNOME panel applet to control CDEmu daemon The following packages have been unpacked but not yet configured. They must be configured using dpkg --configure or the configure menu option in dselect for them to work: cdemu-daemon CDEmu daemon cdemu-client A simple command-line client to control CDEmu daemon The following packages are only half configured, probably due to problems configuring them the first time. The configuration should be retried using dpkg --configure <package> or the configure menu option in dselect: transmission-daemon lightweight BitTorrent client (daemon) vhba-dkms VHBA virtual host bus adapter module 

You could run the command: dpkg --configure <packagename>

 dpkg --configure cdemu-daemon 

In order to

Reconfigure an unpacked package. If -a or --pending is given instead of package, all unpacked but unconfigured packages are configured. 

Furthermore you could use:

sudo apt-get -f install sudo apt-get --reinstall install gcdemu 

To fix the packages that are in a mess.

Examples from here:

community wiki answer - solved by OP

This problem was resolved by running the following terminal command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a 

You have to run those commands with sudo preceding them so they can be executed with super user credentials Example:

sudo apt-get autoremove "NAME OF PACKAGE HERE" 

If you have deleted /var/cache in a misguided attempt to clean up (like I did), this might fix the issue (it did for me):

sudo mkdir /var/cache/debconf