auto complete broke with apt-get remove

That sort of error usually occurs because of a badly formatted package installed from a third-party source (but can occur due to other reasons as well). What's the paragraph immediately before the indicated line?

the number changed again now its 18063 the paragraph above it is

Package: liburi-perl
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: perl
Installed-Size: 392
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <email address hidden>
Architecture: all
Version: 1.52-1
Depends: perl, libmime-base64-perl, libnet-perl
Suggests: libwww-perl (>= 5.41)
Conflicts: libwww-perl (<< 5.41)
Description: module to manipulate and access URI strings
 URI is a collection of Perl modules that represent and manipulate Uniform

That's weird.

I think we need to see the preceding paragraph, the offending line, and a couple of lines of context after it, all related to the same error message line number.

i just put the status file in my dropbox so it can be pulled. ill post the link in here so it can be downloaded.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/302809/status

otherwise here are the lines b4 and after 18063

18049 - 18073

Package: liburi-perl
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: perl
Installed-Size: 392
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <email address hidden>
Architecture: all
Version: 1.52-1
Depends: perl, libmime-base64-perl, libnet-perl
Suggests: libwww-perl (>= 5.41)
Conflicts: libwww-perl (<< 5.41)
Description: module to manipulate and access URI strings
 URI is a collection of Perl modules that represent and manipulate Uniform
 Resource Identifier (URI) references as specified in RFC 2396.
 .
 URI objects can be used to access and manipulate the various components
 that make up these strings. There are also methods to combine URIs in
 various ways.
 .
 The URI class replaces the URI::URL class that used to be distributed with
 libwww-perl. This package also includes an emulation of the old URI::URL
 interface, which implements both the old and the new interface.
Original-Maintainer: Debian Perl Group <email address hidden>
Homepage: http://search.cpan.org/dist/URI/

Thank you. I was hesitant to ask for it, since it contains private information (namely, what you have installed).

First of all, I must apologise. It seems grep-dctrl miscounts the lines, and so the line number is not accurate.

The offending paragraph is this:

Package: pidgin-senscreenshot
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: web
Installed-Size: 259
Maintainer: Raoul Berger [<email address hidden>]
Architecture: amd64
Version: 0.8-3
Depends: pidgin (>= 2.4.0), libpurple-bin (>= 2.6.0), libcurl3, libgtk2.0-0 (>=
2.6.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.14.0)
Description: Send Screenshot plugin for Pidgin IM client.
 Capture a rectangular area of your screen and send it...
 * as a file
 * directly as an image (only enabled by some protocols)
 * to a HTTP image hosting provider (do not send sensitive data !)
 * to a remote FTP server.

 .
 More info at http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-sendscreenshot/
Homepage: http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-sendscreenshotx

And the problem is the empty line after "* to a remote FTP server.". You can manually edit the file to remove that empty line (just make sure no package management program is running at the same time), if you wish, and the problem should go away. The most likely source for this error is the pidgin-screenshot package, though other causes are possible.

Sorry, pidgin-senscreenshot of course.

Note to Ubuntu people: I've just released to Debian experimental version 2.15 which fixes the line-counting bug mentioned above. In other respects, this is not a dctrl-tools bug.

yo thanks so much. that completely solved everything. i had no idea before what i was looking for. thanks again

Thanks, Antti-Juhani. I tried to sync 2.15 from experimental into maverick, but ran into bug 635591. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

Shouldn't this bug be considered resolved? The line-counting bug is fixed in oneiric, and rest of it isn't a dctrl-tools issue.