I've gotten mail from cron the last three days about bad lines in /var/lib/dpkg/status on one of my machines; the first two times, I opened it up in vi and corrected the illegal characters. Today, there was a second error:
--- /etc/cron.daily/dwww: dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 19804 package `crypt ++el': field name `Sectionº' must be followed by colon /etc/cron.daily/standard: print_command: bad command type: 1431634013 Stopping myself.../etc/cron.daily/standard: line 58: 8714 Aborted savelog -c 7 dpkg.status >/dev/null --- apt-get update (with testing, testing/non-US, and stable/updates in sources.list) downloaded the package lists, then died with another error (which I didn't preserve, but it appeared related to the /var/lib/dpkg/status corruption) when it tried to merge the new package lists. I commented out the testing lines (so that it was grabbing only the security updates) and it completed, but /var/lib/dpkg/status still gives the same parse error. As for the second error, `dpkg -S` (on another machine, since the /var/lib/dpkg/status corruption prevents it from running on that box) tells me that /etc/cron.daily/standard belongs to the cron package. So I `apt-get install --reinstall cron` to fix it - and get a segfault back. And so I arrive at my three questions: 1) What's likely to have scrambled /var/lib/dpkg/status? I had a Netscape-induced system crash a few days back (yes, Netscape managed to get some of its processes wedged into uninterruptible sleep so thoroughly that the system, though still accessible over the network, was unable to shut down cleanly - never seen that happen before under Linux and I hope to never see it again) and ended up having to fsck everything manually, but I wouldn't expect to see that flipping random bits in files that weren't even open at the time. 2) Is there any way to automatically repair /var/lib/dpkg/status or do I need to manually correct each bad character as it is reported to me? 3) Is the /var/lib/dpkg/status corruption sufficient cause for apt-get to segfault, or can I expect that problem to persist even after /var/lib/dpkg/status has been repaired? If it does remain, what's the easiest way to fix apt-get when apt-get doesn't work? -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss
