Tito, thank you for your reply.

I tried to correct the partial confiuration error for libc-bin. I tried

# dpkg --configure -a
# apt-get install -f

# apt-get reinstall --reinstall libc-bin

# apt-get install -f libc-bin

and finally:

  # dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq --dry-run libc-bin
        dpkg: error processing package libc-bin (--remove):
         this is an essential package; it should not be removed
        Errors were encountered while processing:
         libc-bin

My fear is that if I purge the package and attenpt to reinstall it,
my system will be dead in the water and in need of reinstallation

$ ls -ls /etc/ld.so.conf.d/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 May 20 09:49 .
drwxr-xr-x 115 root root 12288 Jun 23 15:05 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    44 Sep 22  2022 libc.conf
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   100 Jul 13  2023 x86_64-linux-gnu.conf

Should there be a fakeroot-x86_64-linux-gnu.conf here?

# ldconfig
ldconfig: Can't stat /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu: No such file or
directory

Indeed I do not have it.

  # lsconfig -v
  /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu: (from /etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu.conf:3)
        libnss_compat.so.2 -> libnss_compat.so.2
        ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 -> ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
        [dozens of lines like this in which a file has symlink itself]]
  /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu: (from /etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu.conf:4)
        libavformat.so.59 -> libavformat.so.59.27.100
        [again, dozens of these recursive links]
  /lib: (from <builtin>:0)
  /usr/lib: (from <builtin>:0)

---

     Haines Brown