How do I rebuild a corrupt dpkg status file?
- by Ramón
Whenever I type  sudo apt-get remove  and then press the Tab key for auto-completion I get the following message:
grep-status: /var/lib/dpkg/status:15945: expected a colon.
I don't see anything especially strange at line 15945 in the status file.  It's a dot character in the description field of a mono library package and inserting a colon did not help.  Removing the line containing the dot did not work either.  Overwriting the file with status-old resulted in the same message.
Is there some way to rebuild the status file?