/sbin/acpi_available: 5: /sbin/acpi_available:

Recently my server crashed and at first I did not notice any errors. After a while I got an email from cron, where it stated that /etc/cron.daily/apt crashed:

/etc/cron.daily/apt:
/sbin/acpi_available: 1: /sbin/acpi_available: 8: not found
/sbin/acpi_available: 1: /sbin/acpi_available: : not found
/sbin/acpi_available: 1: /sbin/acpi_available: �
�
@@DDP�td��@�@6874Q�td/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
GNUGNU�P�yj~���z: not found
/sbin/acpi_available: 1: /sbin/acpi_available: ELF

: not found
/sbin/acpi_available: 1: /sbin/acpi_available: 
X: not found
/sbin/acpi_available: 5: /sbin/acpi_available: : not found
/sbin/acpi_available: 2: /sbin/acpi_available: Syntax error: newline unexpected (expecting ")")

I had no idea what had happened, but going into /etc/cron.daily/ I was able to run “./apt” and see that the error could be reproduced. The problem could have been a broken acpi_available I thought, but had no idea from which package it came from. This is where apt-file is very handy. It searches for filenames inside packages. This is how I set it up and searched for acpi_available:

apt-get install apt-file
apt-file update
apt-file search acpi_available

The output is pretty straight forward:

root server:/etc/cron.daily# apt-file search acpi_available
powermgmt-base: /sbin/acpi_available
powermgmt-base: /usr/share/man/man1/acpi_available.1.gz
root server:/etc/cron.daily# 

So I just reinstalled (apt-get –reinstall install powermgmt-base) the package, ran “./apt” and had no error :)