Hi again, (and sorry again for any split lines) Okay, so I was fooling around with the --root option again, and after I realized from one of Xavier's posts that pre/post install scriptlets won't be run at all until /bin/sh (from bash) is installed, I figured I should install the packages twice. This led to two issues. I have a bash script (attached) that basically does: pkglist=( ... bunch o' base packages ... ) mkdir /tmp/pacman.test pacman -U --root /tmp/pacman.test ${pkglist[*]} pacman -U --root /tmp/pacman.test ${pkglist[*]} The second install of coreutils causes: error: cannot remove file '/tmp/pacman.test/usr/bin/sleep': Read-only file system error: failed to commit transaction (transaction aborted) error: failed to release transaction (could not commit transaction) First Issue: CPU usage then goes to 100%, so I assume that pacman has gone into an infinite loop somewhere. Second Issue: the real concern is the "Read-only file system" error, since /tmp is on a tmpfs and is definitely not read-only. My / partition is read-only though, and # ls -l /tmp/pacman.test/usr/bin/sleep lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-08-16 16:13 /tmp/pacman.test/usr/bin/sleep -> /bin/sleep So pacman was following the absolute symlink *out* of the --root and trying to remove /bin/sleep from my main arch install ?? Cheers, Jeremy Get news delivered with the All new Yahoo! Mail. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page. Start today at http://mrd.mail.yahoo.com/try_beta?.intl=ca