I've got a feeling something bad just happened to this machine.
faheem@bulldog:/usr/local/src/mercurial$ sudo dpkg -i
mercurial_3.0-1_amd64.deb mercurial-common_3.0-1_all.deb
dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin
and /sbin
This is an old unmaintained machine I've been using for a while. Assuming it was going to die some day. Looks like this might be the day. It starting throwing errors a bit earlier, and it looks like someone just rebooted it.
UPDATE: After running
sudo -s
I checked the value of path
echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games
So some stuff is missing from here, e.g. sbin
, and /usr/sbin
.
UPDATE 2:
As it turns out, person or persons unknown deleted the following lines
from /etc/sudoers
.
Defaults mail_badpass
Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
Thanks to Anthony for explaining.