If you want to remove files for locales which don't interest you (or anything else for that matter), you should tell dpkg about it: that way not only will debsums stop complaining about them, but dpkg won't even install them in the first place.

Here's what I have, in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/locales:

# Drop locales except English and French path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/en/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/fr/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/locale.alias # Drop translated manpages except English and French path-exclude=/usr/share/man/* path-include=/usr/share/man/man[1-9]/* path-include=/usr/share/man/en*/* path-include=/usr/share/man/fr*/* 

If you adapt this to your setup you should find debsums produces much more useful output.

Raphael Hertzog wrote a blog post about this with a little more detail.

If you want to remove files for locales which don't interest you (or anything else for that matter), you should tell dpkg about it: that way not only will debsums stop complaining about them, but dpkg won't even install them in the first place.

Here's what I have, in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/locales:

# Drop locales except English and French path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/en/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/fr/* path-include=/usr/share/locale/locale.alias # Drop translated manpages except English and French path-exclude=/usr/share/man/* path-include=/usr/share/man/man[1-9]/* path-include=/usr/share/man/en*/* path-include=/usr/share/man/fr*/* 

If you adapt this to your setup you should find debsums produces much more useful output.

Raphael Hertzog wrote a blog post about this with a little more detail.

If instead you want to restore the missing files, you need to re-install the affected packages:

apt-get --reinstall install $(debsums -c 2>&1 | grep -E -o 'from [^ ]* package' | cut -d\ -f2 | sort -u)