Bill Webster wrote:
Here's what I did: 1) Emptied the sources.list file (0 length file) 2) ran 'apt-get update' 3) ran 'apt-cache search ".*"' I get a list of 774 packages???
Let me guess, you have 774 packages installed? apt-cache search has always additionally searched locally installed packages for me and I always thought that this was a useful feature. Though I don't know how exactly it does this.