I have a lot of spam in my pacman.log now. I guess the main problem is that it logs everything, including all operations which are canceled and not executed. See for example the last part of my log , where I was just checking the effect of remove flags. [2009-11-07 16:50] Running 'pacman -R epiphany' [2009-11-07 16:50] Running 'pacman -Rs epiphany' [2009-11-07 16:50] Running 'pacman -Rcs epiphany' [2009-11-07 16:50] Running 'pacman -Rcss epiphany' [2009-11-07 16:50] Running 'pacman -Rcs epiphany' [2009-11-07 16:51] Running 'pacman -Rs gstreamer0.10-plugins' [2009-11-07 16:51] Running 'pacman -Rsu gstreamer0.10-plugins' And imagine the output when I was testing some commands like the ones mentioned there : http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Redownloading_all_installed_packages pacman -Sdw --noconfirm `pacman -Q | awk '{ print $1 }'` I have the whole list of installed packages several times in my log. ahah