This is on Slackware 14.1/64. I was away with my netbook, got home, and found several updates for all my Slackware installs. My other systems updated as usual. However, my netbook returns this:

and nothing gets updated. I don't know much about the internal of slackpkg, other than it has always worked without problems. I did find one thread with the same error message, the fix was something to do with 'regex' in the blacklist file. I don't see anything unusual in that file.

How do I go about finding out what is causing this error?

Last thought, slackpkg update worked as usual.

Maybe a range error in blacklist file, or greylist file if you use it.

root@claudio-pcbash~# grep [a-z] <<<foo
foo
root@claudio-pcbash~# LANGUAGE=C grep [z-a] <<<foo
grep: Invalid range end

I had to do some learning to fix this error. First of all, I had no idea what a 'regex' expression was. Did some reading to get a basic understanding. Once I had that, and looked at my /etc/slackpkg/blacklist file, I did in fact have a problem. I have packages from Alien Bob and Willy installed. Some how, I have no idea how, the entry for 'wsr' was wrong. When I looked at it, the line read '[1-0]+wsr' I edited the line to read [0-9]+wsr and now all is well.

I'm not a programmer, so I know I have a lot to learn. I'm far better with hardware. The term 'regex' meant nothing to me. I now know this stands for "regular expression". I'm posting this for anyone who is in the dark like myself, and stumbles across this. Hope it helps someone.