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What is the answer to the question "Are you root?" asked by APT?

I was installing the restricted extras package when I got this message after typing my password.

I typed yes in answer to the question and now the terminal is filling up with the letter y!

What should I do?

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  • Related: Permission denied, are you root? This question is somewhat different, though, in that it arises from the assumption that a reply is intended, and in that a core part of it is the accidental invocation of the infinitely looping yes command. (I was probably wrong to have voted to close this as a duplicate before.) Sep 5, 2017 at 22:32

2 Answers 2

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"Are you root?" from apt-get is not expecting you to type an answer - by doing so you have accidentally executed the command yes, which does just what it says

DESCRIPTION
       Repeatedly output a line with all specified STRING(s), or `y'.

You can stop it just by typing Ctrl-C in the terminal.

The "Are you root?" question is just meant to give you a hint why the command you just tried failed i.e. because you didn't have sufficient privileges to run it, and should have used sudo

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
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As steeldriver says, this is not a question that you answer interactively. Instead, it is a reminder that you must run commands like apt-get and aptitude as root, for package installation to succeed.

If you're not running it as root or are not sure if you are--in particular, if you are not using sudo--then you should run it as root with sudo. See this question for more information:

If you are using sudo but still get that error, that's strange. There are some similar errors can occur when permission to access a lock file is denied due to another concurrently running package management utility or stale locks (that continue existing after the utility they represent is no longer running). So some of the answers here may help:

If none of this helps, then you'll have to provide more information. In particular, to get better answers, you should add the complete and exact text from the Terminal, including the lines showing commands you are running (and especially the command or commands that result in the "are you root" message), to your question, by editing your question.

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