[arch-general] oops, 'sudo: pacman: command not found'

[Doug Newgard]

On Sun, 07 Jun 2020 18:09:12 -0700
Greg Minshall <minshall at 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.