Error while installing package - Ubuntu 12.04

Question

Below is the error i am getting. when i install or upgrade , i have been struggling for a while to solve .

    sudo apt-get upgrade
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree       
    Reading state information... Done
    The following packages have been kept back:
      linux-generic linux-generic-pae linux-headers-generic linux-headers-generic-pae linux-image-generic linux-image-generic-pae
    The following packages will be upgraded:
      bamfdaemon dpkg dpkg-dev duplicity libbamf0 libbamf3-0 libdpkg-perl libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglapi-mesa libglu1-mesa
      libpulse-mainloop-glib0 libpulse0 libpulsedsp libxatracker1 linux-libc-dev pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat
      pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils x11-common xbase-clients xorg xserver-xorg
      xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-video-all
    28 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
    Need to get 0 B/8,980 kB of archives.
    After this operation, 6,144 B of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
    Preconfiguring packages ...
    (Reading database ... 
    dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libservlet2.5-java' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

    dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libnm-glib-vpn1' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

    dpkg: warning: files list file for package `network-manager' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

    dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libnm-glib4' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

    dpkg: warning: files list file for package `activity-log-manager-control-center' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

    dpkg: warning: files list file for package `libnm-util2' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
    (Reading database ... 50%dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
     files list file for package 'libnspr4' is missing final newline
    E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

Answer 1

It seems that the meta information in /var/lib/dpkg/info are scrambled.

For all problematic packages try to reinstall them with: apt-get install --reinstall

e.g.:

 apt-get install --reinstall  libservlet2.5-java libnm-glib-vpn1 \
   network-manager libnm-glib4 activity-log-manager-control-center  libnm-util2 \
   libnspr4

If libnm-util2 continue to makes troubles remove the meta information:

rm /var/lib/dpkg/info/libnspr4{:,.}*