Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
to clarify, you've done something to the normal .bz2 Packages files, I gather (like unzipped them, right?) and perhaps in the process you've mutated them into some other form resulting in more than one line of data being crammed into $inputline. just a thought.
There is an unzipped Packages file on debian-multimendia mirror I am using, so I use that instead. (This is the purpose of the "|grep -v z" in script.)