Debian Installation :: Dpkg-scanpackages Fails When Package Limit Exceeded

After receiving no response either here or on IRC, I copied 80 package files to a temporary directory and ran dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null > Packages with the expected result. The curious part is the delay when output redirection is not used: nothing appears until the script completes, when the result is dumped to the screen. It therefore appears that there is an upper limit to the number of packages that the script can handle, somewhere between 80 and 42,474.

Is this an undocumented feature, or just a peculiarity of my system?

I'm new to Debian and wanting to set up a local repository on my work drive. After following instructions online and copying all packages (~43,000) from the DVD set into /work/Debian/8.2/packages/ I ran dpkg-scan-packages as instructed:

Code: Select all# dpkg-scan-packages . /dev/null | gzip -9c > Packages.gz

This produced an empty file. I then ran dpkg-scanpackages with no output redirection expecting to see a flood of text on the screen, but all I got were error messages suggesting that it can see the .deb packages but is not parsing them:

Code: Select allroot@qbx:~# dpkg-scanpackages /work/Debian/8.2/packages
dpkg-deb: error: invalid character ' ' in archive '/work/Debian/8.2/packages/libshhopt1_1.1.7-3_i386.deb' member 'debian-binary' size
dpkg-scanpackages: error: couldn't parse control information from /work/Debian/8.2/packages/libshhopt1_1.1.7-3_i386.deb

[Code] ....

This all seems in accord with the man page, and it's so simple I'm wondering what I'm missing.