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

[Xianwen Chen (陈贤文)]

Dear Ralph and Eli,

Thank you.

As Ralph suspected, there are quite many files on my system that had 
wrong permissions or GID's.

Is there a way to automatically correct all the permissions and GID's?

Yours sincerely,

Xianwen

On 08/09/2019 11.28, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:
> On 9/8/19 5:20 AM, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> 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.
> pacman -S pacutils && paccheck --file-properties
>