During the Plesk 10.4 update the installer tries to “clean up” your platform. “Clean up” is Plesk code for “Break". The update deletes everything in /var/cache. While this area is reserved for caching, most of the applications that use it don’t expect their directory structure (that they created on installation) to disappear from under them. This was the case for the /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron cron program which runs makewhatis which requires the directory /var/cache/man.

/etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron: /usr/sbin/makewhatis: line 388: /var/cache/man/whatis: No such file or directory chmod: cannot access `/var/cache/man/whatis’: No such file or directory /usr/sbin/makewhatis: line 388: /var/cache/man/whatis: No such file or directory chmod: cannot access `/var/cache/man/whatis’: No such file or directory /usr/sbin/makewhatis: line 388: /var/cache/man/whatis: No such file or directory chmod: cannot access `/var/cache/man/whatis’: No such file or directory /usr/sbin/makewhatis: line 388: /var/cache/man/whatis: No such file or directory chmod: cannot access `/var/cache/man/whatis’: No such file or directory

There are a couple of ways to fix this but the majority will possibly get overridden on the next update if Plesk doesn’t address this issue, which they probably won’t because they usually don’t! The simplest thing to do is create the missing folder branch and check it is still there after the next update. Log in to your Plesk server and issue the following command:

mkdir /var/cache/man

More Plesk fixes are available on Fixing problems caused by updating Plesk