Apt-mirror: Illegal division by zero

Question

I'm trying to set up an apt-mirror service for an offline repository but I've hit a weird error. I edited my mirror.list file to contain the proper paths (a USB drive mounted at /media/Ubuntu) but when I try to run apt-mirror, I get the following:

$ sudo apt-mirror /etc/apt/mirror.list
Argument "M-BM- " isn't numeric in numeric lt (<) at /usr/bin/apt-mirror line 204.
Downloading 982 index files using   threads...
Illegal division by zero at /usr/bin/apt-mirror line 209.

Any ideas as to what this could mean?

Answer 1

I'm looking at my crystal ball… It's a bit hazy… Ah, there it is.

You have an unbreakable space after nthreads in your mirror.list file. Replace it by a normal space.

_{Explanation: line 204 in the script is where apt-mirror compares the number of URLS — which is always numeric — with the value of the nthreads configuration setting. The parser for configuration settings doesn't check for numeric values, so a non-numeric value isn't detected until the setting is used. M-BM- displays two unprintable bytes c2a0 (0x42=B and 0x20=space, with M- indicating +0x80); this two-byte sequence encodes the unbreakable space in UTF-8.}

In the future, post the full content of your configuration file when you ask such questions.