package nmap-common 7.91+dfsg1+really7.80+dfsg1-2build1 failed to install/upgrade: installed nmap-common package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 126

I was upgrading my WSL distro and found that the gzip executable was broken. I solved this problem by downloading the source code and rebuilding gzip.

/usr/bin/gzip would not run: could not execute binary file: Exec format error.

Hello,

Thank you for writing this bug report. I attempted to reproduce this issue on both WSL2 and lxc but didn't encounter the error. I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 on both using do-release-upgrade -d.

Do you know which distro version you upgraded from? Also did you attempt to install nmap after the upgrade?

Thanks

I was updating from focal.

Once I fixed gzip, I was able to install nmap and nmap-common.

I preserved the broken version of gzip as gzip.old. Here is the output of the file command:

file gzip.old
gzip.old: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=09387e1f48c88dcc27c89d83dec42856690b93b0, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

This looks like local corruption or misconfiguration, rather than a bug in Ubuntu.

Without steps to reproduce the problem, there is little that can be done on this bug. I'll mark this bug as Incomplete for now, pending someone else confirming that it is a bug or unless someone can provide steps to reproduce.

Please do report any other bugs you may find.

It appears that I have had the same issue affect me this morning. I'm not able to help technically, but I wanted to make sure my bug report got logged.

Thanks for the feedback Casey. We still need the reproduction steps to act on this, so let's see if someone can provide them.

I also got this bug today after doing a long overdue WSL update from "20.10" groovy to "Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS". Same "126" error code on nmap-common.

Any details I can provide to assist with the bug tracing? I'm not very savvy with Linux so would need some pointers on how to dig up whatever's needed.

It actually appears to be related to this issue with gzip on WSL1.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gzip/+bug/1966849

After updating from WSL1 to WSL2, the gzip error went away, and nmap & nmap-common installed just fine.

Thanks for the information @hydrodan. It seems that while the gzip bug is not fixed a proper workaround is to move to WSL2. I hope this can help others facing this issue.

If I understand correct what's been discussed so far, it seems to me that this is not an issue with nmap, but rather with gzip on WSL environments. I am tempted to close this bug as Invalid. Let's wait a few days to see if someone else has a different opinion.

[Expired for nmap (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]