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Suddenly ubuntu 14.04 started to print this:

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/apt/lists/ru.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty_restricted_i18n_Translation-en%5fUS (1)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

I did use only "Software updater". What is the right way to fix it?

Here is an ls -la output

ls -la /var/lib/apt/lists/ | grep restricted_i18n_Translation -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 окт. 18 2013 ru.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty-backports_restricted_i18n_Translation-en -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5062829 мая 8 2014 ru.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_trusty_restricted_i18n_Translation-en%5fUS

Confused with the date of the file: the 8th of May, 2014. I've met the problem few days ago.

Capacytron
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1 Answers1

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Try a sudo rm -r /var/lib/apt/lists/* and then run sudo apt-get update again.

ike
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  • What is the root cause for this? Deleting the /var/lib/apt/lists/* directory seems like a brute-force fix of the symptom, not the cause. – MattC Aug 31 '15 at 20:42
  • @Mattc the file become corrupted, so we delete it and regenerate it. Possibly due to power loss or simply an unexpected exit to an operation. Could be network problem while updating, could be many things. – ike Sep 01 '15 at 01:05
  • Yeah, this is happening on my AWS boxes a non-trivial amount and they are not being rebooted or anything. Just really odd and stops my chef runs cold until I manually clear those caches out. – MattC Sep 01 '15 at 22:05
  • @MattC it's probably easier to write a cron than debugging this, but is there any error at all when running apt-get update after clean removal? Otherwise I can't really help, try asking a new question. Also, did you try the ideas in the linked question that this is a dup of? – ike Sep 02 '15 at 02:16
  • @MattC I too am experiencing this an non-trivial amount. We have 4 stacks with anywhere from 10-20 instances each, and I would say everytime I run update custom cookbooks, maybe every couple weeks, at least 20% of them will fail with this error. Different machines too. I end up having to follow these steps before I can run any cookbook at all... kind of defeats the whole purpose of opsworks. Were you able to find an automated workaround? – Kevin Jhangiani Apr 02 '16 at 06:29