How to solve "Unable to find expected entry 'restricted/binary-1386/Packages' Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file"?

I'm a new user of Ubuntu 13.10. I recently tried to resolve a Skype installation issue and added some PPA involving binary-1386. Every time I run sudo apt-get update, I get the following error:

W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/saucy/Release  Unable to find expected entry 'restricted/binary-1386/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)
W: Failed to fetch http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/saucy/Release  Unable to find expected entry 'main/binary-1386/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)
...
...
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

I have spent the last two hours trying to resolve this issue, and made changes to my sources.list file by resetting to.the default saucy settings, but these errors are still occuring. I've also unchecked everything in Software and Updates section, but this still seems to appear. The error messages seem to be related to the 'binary-1386/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file) issue as shown above.

Solution 1:

I backtracked what I did today: I was following the Skype instructions on help.ubuntu.com/community/Skype And used sudo dpkg --add-architecture 1386 instead of i386. I did a quick search on how to remove dpkg and removed the 1386 that was added, and now everything works!

-- posted by OP in comments.

To remove an incorrect architecture (1386 in this case), run:

sudo dpkg --remove-architecture 1386

Solution 2:

Open the sources files and search for binary-1386 and replace 1 by i then save..

Sources files are found either in

/etc/apt/sources.list

and/or you can find many files inside the directory /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

now open the sources file with sudo and edit

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list 

and/or

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/****.list