md5sum crashed with signal 7 in strlen()

[Ron Moy]

Binary package hint: coreutils

During update a dialog box (error notification) popped up which read:

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/md5sum
NonfreeKernelModules: wl
Package: coreutils 6.10-6ubuntu1
ProcAttrCurrent: unconfined
ProcCmdline: md5sum /usr/share/i18n/locales/de_AT
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
Signal: 7
SourcePackage: coreutils
StacktraceTop:
 strlen () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
 ?? () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
 setlocale () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
 ?? ()
 __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
Title: md5sum crashed with signal 7 in strlen()
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-7-generic i686
UserGroups:

[Apport retracing service (apport)]

StacktraceTop:strlen () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
_nl_find_locale () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
setlocale () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
main (argc=2, argv=0xbf83b124) at md5sum.c:600

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

Thank you for reporting this, it looks like the stacktrace should have enough information for a developer to look at it. The behavior that dpkg is showing is normal for when a package manager is interrupted during action, but md5sum shouldn't crash on it. You can fix the dpkg problem by running
   sudo dpkg --configure -a