Garbage in package info (Help!!)

[Volker Wysk]

Hi!

Something went seriously wrong with my installation.

I can't run cryptsetup:

desktop ~ % LANG=C cryptsetup
/sbin/cryptsetup: line 2: syntax error near unexpected token
`$'\236\3405\023^\373\016\'?\361\260\030Vt\310\351\307a\r\252\324\201h\
331|\366\302*?  (...) 

I've tried to reinstall it, but this leads to this:

desktop ~ % LANG=C apt-get install --reinstall cryptsetup
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 12 not
upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/151 kB of archives.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
 files list file for package 'libkf5unitconversion5:amd64' is missing
final newline
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

The package libkf5unitconversion5, which it depends on, has garbage in 
its list file:

desktop ~ % head -n1 \
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libkf5unitconversion5\:amd64.list 
��%�o�D�4�CnF�����WW��P�EW*23n9b@�G�.��9�#)�GY� �V* (...)

So has the symbols file
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libkf5unitconversion5:amd64.symbols.

And this goes on with more packages, at least with
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libkf5unitconversion-data.list


What in the world is going on?? 


Volker