mangled packages

[Colin Law]

On 8 August 2013 13:08, Art Edwards
<edwardsa at icantbelieveimdoingthis.com> wrote:
> While doing a routine dist-upgrade, I found that several packages were mangled.
> I'm running 12.04 on a dual-core, amd, 64 bit machine. Here is a typical error:
>
> dpkg: warning: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 37548 package 'liblcms2-2:amd64':
>  missing description
> dpkg: error: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 37548:
>  field name `' must be followed by colon
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
> A package failed to install.  Trying to recover:

I believe that you can re-generate that file by

sudo dpkg --clear-avail
sudo apt-get update

Colin