i should mention that i seem to have the correct pacman "distribution" file: ---- bash apollo2 (master): {1198} ls -l /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pacman-5.2.1-* -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 856820 Apr 30 03:23 /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pacman-5.2.1-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 857872 May 23 03:04 /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pacman-5.2.1-6-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst ---- (going through my symlink). if that helps me patch back up my system? cheers, Greg

On Sun, 07 Jun 2020 18:09:12 -0700 Greg Minshall <minshall@acm.org> wrote:

hi. a month ago i ran out of room on my root file system, so relocated /var/cache/pacman to /home, and left behind a symlink.

today, after a while, i did a 'pacman -Syu', which downloaded lots, and ran through a lot new keys, upgrading, etc., then failed (see below), and (the symbolic link at) /var/cache/pacman seems to have disappeared.

any suggestions on how i might recover? (and, should i, possibly, rather than using a symlink, have modified, e.g., /etc/pacman.conf?)

i have all the files still in /home/pacman/pkg, etc. (and have put back the symlink).

cheers, and thanks in advance, Greg ---- (210/487) upgrading pacman-mirrorlist [#########... truncated ... #################] 100% warning: /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist installed as /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew error: could not open file /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pacman-5.2.1-6-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst: No such file or directory error: could not commit transaction error: failed to commit transaction (transaction aborted) Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded. bash apollo2 (master): {1185} sudo pacman -Syu [sudo] password for minshall: sudo: pacman: command not found bash apollo2 (master): {1186} ls /var/cache/ atop.d/ fontconfig/ ldconfig/ lightdm/ man/ pkgfile/ private/

Use pacman-static or an install disk (pacman --root) to finish the update and reinstall pacman. In the future, bind mounts.

hi. a month ago i ran out of room on my root file system, so relocated /var/cache/pacman to /home, and left behind a symlink. (…) “/var/cache/pacman” is owned by pacman and is supposed to be a directory. If you have removed the directory and create a symlink instead, the next update has simply overwritten it with proper contents. Since it has been overwritten, it’s now an empty directory that contains nothing and pacman can’t find “pacman-5.2.1.6-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst” there. It seems that in the process you have deleted “/usr/bin/pacman” and, because pacman can’t install things from non-existend archive, you are also missing pacman now. Reinstall pacman using Arch ISO.

As for moving the cache, it should be done using `CacheDir` in the config, not through symlink. However, moving it to “/home” seems fishy. Where exactly is it in “/home”? If your private home directory, you are opening yourself to attacks. The cache should be in a location accessible only to the root (or another user has sufficient privileges to run `pacman` without further authentication).