How to Fix dpkg Was Interrupted, You Must Manually Run Sudo

Apt is a popular package management module in Linux, that allows you to install, upgrade, update and remove packages. Sometimes, when you run apt-get command, you may get the error ‘dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run sudo…’. In this article, we will learn how to fix this error in Linux.

How to Fix dpkg Was Interrupted, You Must Manually Run Sudo

This error mostly occurs after you have updated or upgraded your Linux system. It happens when dpkg installation gets interrupted due to some reason or the other and the installation remains incomplete. Here are the steps to fix it.

1. Delete Updates

Open terminal and run the following command to delete downloaded updates from your system.

$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/updates

$ sudo rm *

This will delete any incomplete updates that could not be installed on your system.

2. Try Update & Upgrade Your System

Run the following commands to update and upgrade your system.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

If all is well, your system should update & upgrade properly. If you get the message ‘E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock’ it means some other program is updating or upgrading the system or installing another package.

In such cases, check if some other process is locking dpkg files. If so, wait for the installation to complete.

3. Check if dpkg files are locked

Run the following command to check if dpkg files are locked.

$ ps aux | grep -i apt

Ideally, you should get only one output shown below. If you see any more lines in output, note down the PIDs of those processes and use kill command to kill those processes. Those processes are the ones locking your dpkg files.

S+   19:16   0:00 grep --color=auto -i apt

Once you have killed locking processes, or if you don’t find any, run the following command to remove locks.

$ sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/lock
$ sudo rm /var/cache/apt/archives/lock
$ sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock

Next, try running the dpkg –configure specified by the original error message.

$ sudo dpkg --configure -a

Finally, try again to update & upgrade your system.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

This time the updates should work properly.

In this article, we have learnt how to fix the error ‘dpkg was interrupted…’ which tends to break apt-get command in Linux. It is basically because dpkg gets locked due to some interruption causing the installation to get locked. You can use these steps in all Ubuntu/Debian systems.

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