Hi, I am also affected by this bug. Here is the e-mail I receive every week (the complete e-mail is 16MB !):
/etc/cron.weekly/dhelp: terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range' what(): basic_string::erase: __pos (which is 18446744073709551615) > this->size() (which is 0) Dhelp::IndexerError: Broken pipe indexing /usr/share/doc/muscle/muscle.html , /usr/share/doc/muscle/muscle.html [...] , /usr/share/doc/libatlas-doc/atlas_devel.pdf.gz , using /usr/bin/index++ --config-file /usr/share/dhelp/config/swish++.conf --index-file /var/lib/dhelp/documents.index --follow-links - (/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/dhelp.rb:616:in `rescue in index' /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/dhelp.rb:609:in `index' /usr/sbin/dhelp_parse:171:in `do_deferred_indexing' /usr/sbin/dhelp_parse:205:in `main' /usr/sbin/dhelp_parse:221:in `<main>') A quick way to reproduce this bug is to run this command: # echo /usr/share/doc/libatlas-doc/atlas_devel.pdf.gz | /usr/bin/index++ --config-file /usr/share/dhelp/config/swish++.conf --index-file index - terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range' what(): basic_string::erase: __pos (which is 18446744073709551615) > this->size() (which is 0) Aborted (core dumped) This should make it easier to debug for someone who is familiar with swish++. My guess is that files with double extensions (.pdf.gz) are not handled correctly and then index++ is confused by binary data and crashes. This can be seen by running: # echo /usr/share/doc/libatlas-doc/atlas_devel.pdf.gz | strace -f /usr/bin/index++ --config-file /usr/share/dhelp/config/swish++.conf --index-file index - and in the strace log, I see: read(0, "/usr/share/doc/libatlas-doc/atla"..., 4096) = 47 stat("/usr/share/doc/libatlas-doc/atlas_devel.pdf.gz", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=253989, ...}) = 0 lstat("/usr/share/doc/libatlas-doc/atlas_devel.pdf.gz", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=253989, ...}) = 0 unlink("/var/lib/dhelp/tmp/atlas_devel.pdf") = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) which means that /var/lib/dhelp/tmp/atlas_devel.pdf is never created. -- Laurent.