conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

hoodie · 2015-01-03 19:05:44

Hello,
I have a little problem with updating and hope somebody can tell me what to do about it.
I tried updating my system today (pacman -Syu) and keep getting "/usr/share/... exists in filesystem".
Installing packages with --force works, but that keeps telling me "error: failed to remove /usr/share/ (not a directory)".
My /usr/share is a symlink to a folder on another drive (because I only have a 16GB SSD for "/"), which has been working fine for 2years, but now it seems to cause this problem.

Can this be a new behaviour of pacman 4.2.0?

Thank you
hoodie

Trilby · 2015-01-03 19:08:32

hoodie wrote:

Installing packages with --force works, but that keeps telling me "error: failed to remove /usr/share/ (not a directory)".
My /usr/share is a symlink to a folder on another drive

Welcome to the forums - unfortunately I really wish you would have posted before you did either of those. Those are two very bad ideas in a row.

There are many ways to open up space on the root partition. I don't know that /usr/share/ would be the first thing to move, but if you want to move it correctly you definitely shouldn't link it; you should mount the other partition to /usr/share.

EDIT: what do you have installed that is taking 16GB? That's not unheard of, but it is quite a lot. If you have large DEs and many big games, that could be ... but unless you have a plethora of very big software you may want to track down what is actually taking up all the space.

graysky · 2015-01-03 19:46:13

I think this is how pacman handles symlink now... use bind mounts if you want to keep your split system. Frankly, /var/share shouldn't be any more that 1 GB or so and 16 GB for a root filesystem is plenty. I recommend that you inspect /var/log and /var/cache ... really the only things in /usr/share that are safe to remove are the doc and gtk-doc dirs in my opinion. In any case, you might find bleach-bit to be helpful in freeing up space, this is safe in my experience:

bleachbit --clean system.cache system.localizations system.trash

Beyond that, use a program like ncdu (eg. ncdu -x /) to see where largest dirs are on the filesystem and to interactively inspect them.

Last edited by graysky (2015-01-03 19:47:55)

Trilby · 2015-01-03 20:15:21

/usr/share can hold quite a bit if a lot of large games are installed - which I why I asked about that. A lot of games store various media (images, music, video cut-sceens, etc) in /usr/share.

graysky · 2015-01-03 20:55:39

Trilby wrote:

/usr/share can hold quite a bit if a lot of large games are installed - which I why I asked about that. A lot of games store various media (images, music, video cut-sceens, etc) in /usr/share.

Didn't know that... my advice to use bind mounts is what the OP needs to do with pacman 4.2 I believe.

Last edited by graysky (2015-01-03 20:55:49)

hoodie · 2015-01-03 20:59:17

Trilby wrote:

what do you have installed that is taking 16GB? That's not unheard of, but it is quite a lot. If you have large DEs and many big games, that could be ... but unless you have a plethora of very big software you may want to track down what is actually taking up all the space.

My laptop came with a 16GB SSD and a 500GB HDD.
I put / on that SSD and /var/cache and /usr/share on a 20GB partition called /mnt/spare on the HDD.
/var/cache is currently 4.8GB and /usr/share too (coincidently). "/" still takes up 9.3GB. So 16GB is a bit too tight unfortunately.

Do you think I should downgrade pacman until in about a month when I got time to reformat the system?
Another Idea I had was turning /mnt/spare from ext4 into btrfs and /mnt/spare/share (/usr/share) and /mnt/space/cache (/var/cache/) into sub-volumes, because I head that it is possible to mount sub-volumes separately somehow. This way I would not have to reformat my main HDD.

hoodie · 2015-01-03 21:05:08

TIMING: did not read your last two posts before posting mine.
What do you mean with "OP"?
I have not done bind mounting before, but from the sound of it it is similar to what I described, is it?
Did you mean something like this: http://backdrift.org/how-to-use-bind-mounts-in-linux (sorry, didn't find anything in the arch wiki in time)

Slithery · 2015-01-03 21:20:45

hoodie wrote:

What do you mean with "OP"?

Original Post(er). In other words you.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2015-01-03 21:21:15

hoodie wrote:

/var/cache is currently 4.8GB

That's rather large; maybe you should clear your pacman cache:

# pacman -Sc

@OP: This means you!

hoodie · 2015-01-03 21:23:26

Thank you very much for your help. I learned a lot today. I am currently adapting my /etc/fstab to bind mount for these folders and next time I partition my drive differently.

bye bye

Arch Linux

#1 2015-01-03 19:05:44

conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#2 2015-01-03 19:08:32

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#3 2015-01-03 19:46:13

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#4 2015-01-03 20:15:21

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#5 2015-01-03 20:55:39

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#6 2015-01-03 20:59:17

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#7 2015-01-03 21:05:08

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#8 2015-01-03 21:20:45

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#9 2015-01-03 21:21:15

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

#10 2015-01-03 21:23:26

Re: conflicting files in /usr/share (cannot remove /usr/share)

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