Debian aptitude install: 'find' not found in PATH or not executable

Question

When I try to install any package such as php5, it gives me this error. I did update and upgrade all libraries.

root@host:~# apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork libapache2-mod-php5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
apache2-mpm-prefork is already the newest version.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libonig2 libqdbm14 php5-cli php5-common
Suggested packages:
  php-pear
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libapache2-mod-php5 libonig2 libqdbm14 php5-cli php5-common
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/6,106 kB of archives.
After this operation, 18.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed
dpkg: warning: 'find' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: error: 1 expected program not found in PATH or not executable
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

Can someone help me?

Answer 1

There is probably something messed up with the permissions of find, find on your installation is probably located in /usr/bin/find, to check the permissions of this application run

ls -l /usr/bin/find

This should return something like this:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 136152 Oct 26  2010 /usr/bin/find

If this returns an error, try to ls find on other locations in you path (eg. /bin/find, /usr/local/sbin/find)

The first part should be identical for the command to work. If not, reset the permissions to with the following command:

chmod 755 /usr/bin/find

This should fix it.