[arch-general] [ Pacman -Syu ] Creating temporary files..., error: command failed to execute correctly

[Ralph Corderoy]

Dear Xianwen,

> After searching on-line, it seemed that similar problems were reported
> by other users of systemd.  The fix is to set owner of / as root.root.
> I tried the solution and it worked!

I'm glad you fixed it.  / not being root:root is strange.  You may wish
to

    sudo -i pacman -Qqkk

to check for other odd permissions, etc., in case they too cause
problems later.  Note, it seems normal for some packages to cause
grumbles from the above command.  If a package is listed, I then do

    sudo -i pacman -Qkk atop

to see more detail of the problem.  Though unfortunately not enough
detail, i.e.

    warning: atop: /var/log/atop/dummy_after (Permissions mismatch)

doesn't tell me what they should be.  One has to grovel around in the
mtree file for that.

    $ zcat /var/lib/pacman/local/atop-*/mtree |
    > grep '^./var/log/atop/dummy_after ' |
    > fmt
    ./var/log/atop/dummy_after time=1549485614.0
    size=0 md5digest=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
    sha256digest=e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855
    $ 

This entry doesn't have a ‘mode=...’ stating the desired permissions.
mtree(5) doesn't say so, but I think it defaults to 0644 for files based
on the other mode-less entries in that mtree file that don't cause
pacman to complain.

Not every error means the file on disk must be changed, perhaps it's a
packaging problem, but it can be a useful aid.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.