On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 06:35:53AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > yup, and if the repos were open... They are not as I've previously > posted. I can report that apt --purge does not, I still see > an /etc/nsswitch.conf, even though ts been purged.
... what. Gene, /etc/nsswitch.conf is NOT part of any Debian package. It's part of the core installation. It is absolutely fundamental to the operation of basically every single piece of the operating system above the boot loader, the kernel, the ld.so shared library loader, and libc. If you remove /etc/nsswitch.conf, you won't be able to look up user names, or service port names, or host names, or basically *any* kind of names of anything at all. (Or, at best, you'll get some sort of default behavior compiled into the C library routines, if any.) wooledg:~$ dpkg -S /etc/nsswitch.conf dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /etc/nsswitch.conf Since nsswitch.conf isn't part of a package, there is absolutely no reason you should think that purging ANY package would remove it. And there is absolutely no reason you should *want* to remove it.