So, at the end of my efforts above, Update Station told me that there were updates. So I updated, rebooted, and tried again. All was the same. So I uninstalled and reinstalled Clementine, mate-terminal, and Firefox. Clementine now works, so that's progress. But mate-terminal will not; when I try to ...

Powerwagon: I really appreciate your time and attention to this issue, but I'm still getting error messages. I changed "foreach" to "for each", but this time I got: for each i (`cat /tmp/sad-packages.txt`) Badly placed ()'s echo " " echo $i i: undefined variable pkg ins...

Powerwagon77: I tried this again using bash as noted, but same result. Please note that I'm running the default shell fish. Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell mikeb@ghostmate ~> bash [mikeb@ghostmate /usr/home/mikeb]$ su Password: root@ghostmate:/usr/home/mikeb # pkg check -s 2>&1 |...

Powerwagon: thanks! But when I cut and paste the first line into a terminal as root, I get an error:

"Ambiguous output redirect"

Should there be spaces after all three |'s?

So..running pkg check -d yielded nothing. Running pkg check -s yielded a semi-infinite list of packages whose signatures did not match. I ran fsck successfully, got a report of a clean system, but that did not fix the problem. Is there a way to force a complete update to the system without reinstall...

OK, I tried the above, but when I open Firefox, I still get just a black window and cannot add the toolbars or search; there is no url window.

Erich: For Firefox, I cannot find xpi-utils with either Caja search or locate. Perhaps that's the problem? Should I try to install Firefox from the Mozilla web site? For mate-terminal, I get mikeb@ghostmate ~> gdb mate-terminal GNU gdb 6.1.1 [FreeBSD] Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GD...

OK, here's what I got. As before, Firefox opened a blank black window, which I then killed. The other two would not open a window: Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell mikeb@ghostmate ~> firefox 1532531664260 addons.xpi-utils WARN updateMetadata: Add-on {972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6...

Eric: thanks for responding quickly! I took your advice and used Octopkg to uninstall Firefox, Clementine, and Mate-terminal, and rebooted. I then used Octopkg again to reinstall all three, but to no avail. Firefox opens a black window with the cursor, but no spinning wheel indicating an application...

After the last upgrade, I find that Clementine and Mate Terminal will not open at all, and Firefox completely disappeared. Reinstalling Firefox put it back on the menu, but it still will not start. Running pkg update and pkg upgrade as root claims that everything is ok. Please help?