Hi, I thought this might be interesting for everyone, so I send a mail here instead of filing a bug report. If you are using install scripts in your packages, make sure the commands you are calling are actually installed before by adjusting your dependencies. Alternatively it might be needed to test if a certain command is available and silently abort if it is not. I found this issue in the iputils install script which fails on a new install as the vercmp command is not found: if [ "$(vercmp $2 20101006-3)" -le 0 ]; then echo " >> Traceroute is now provided by core/traceroute" fi This might be new for some of us, but yes: vercmp is part of the pacman package, but before this is available in a new install 94 other packages get installed, among these is iputils. In general these issues can be solved by adding the needed dependencies to the package. But you need to be really careful to avoid circular or other insane dependencies. In this case adding pacman as a dependency is a bad idea. I would suggest to either remove this statement completely as it just adds useless noise or at least check if vercmp is available; if not we can assume no previous version of iputils was installed. These issues usually affect only packages in [core], especially those in the base group. A new Arch install is created by extracting those packages into an almost empty directory. That's why their install scripts cannot assume anything that is not listed in their dependencies is available yet. Greetings, Pierre -- Pierre Schmitz, https://pierre-schmitz.com