Where is this piece of cruft hiding?

[Snowhog]

There is a piece of cruft 'somewhere' on my system (16.04.3 LTS) that I want to find and remove, as the dpkg warning it generates when doing an apt full-upgrade BUGS ME!

This is the dpkg warning that gets displayed:

dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'linux-headers-3.16.0-37' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed

I'm running the 4.4.0-108-generic kernel, and the only other kernel I have installed is 4.4.0-105-generic. I haven't had a 3.16 kernel in a very long time.

Where is the piece of cruft that generates this warning? For the life of me, I haven't been able to discover it.

[oshunluvr]

I assume you've gone through the normal clean routine. Have you tried

sudo apt-get --force-yes remove <pkgname>

Has potential warnings, but seems safe enough if it's a known dead package.

The file(s) causing the issue are in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ so try ls /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-3.16.0-37* and you should see six files ending with:

.list
.md5sums
.postinst
.postrm
.preinst
.prerm

maybe just removing those will fix it.

[chimak111]

Do

apt-get purge -s linux-headers-3.16.0-37

or

dpkg -l | grep linux-headers-3.16.0-37

or

locate linux-headers-3.16.0-37

offer any hints?

[Snowhog]

Thank you.

A listing of linux-headers* in /var/lib/dpkg/info only finds the associated files for *4.4.0-105* ad *4.4.0-108*
Running sudo apt-get --force-yes remove linux-headers-3.16.0-37:

paul@tanagra:~$ sudo apt-get --force-yes remove linux-headers-3.16.0-37
[sudo] password for paul: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  linux-headers-3.16.0-37
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
After this operation, 64.5 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
dpkg: warning: files list file for package 'linux-headers-3.16.0-37' missing; assuming package has no files currently installed
(Reading database ... 246931 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing linux-headers-3.16.0-37 (3.16.0-37.51) ...
paul@tanagra:~$

The above seems to have resolved my issue; I'm not (so far) getting the dpgk warning now.

[Snowhog]

Do

apt-get purge -s linux-headers-3.16.0-37

or

dpkg -l | grep linux-headers-3.16.0-37

or

locate linux-headers-3.16.0-37

offer any hints?

oshunluvr's first suggestion worked. I've used locate previously, looking for the 3.16.0-37 kernel, and nothing was ever found.

[Snowhog]

I assume you've gone through the normal clean routine. Have you tried

sudo apt-get --force-yes remove <pkgname>

Has potential warnings, but seems safe enough if it's a known dead package.

The file(s) causing the issue are in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ so try ls /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-3.16.0-37* and you should see six files ending with:

.list
.md5sums
.postinst
.postrm
.preinst
.prerm

maybe just removing those will fix it.

As there were no *3.16.0-37* anything on my system, where else would the dpkg warning about it be coming from? Keep in mind now, that the --force-yes remove command seems to have done the trick. But I'd still like to know where the warning message was being generated from.