[SOLVED] System wonky after laptop battery died during system update

musbur · 2024-10-01 16:33:53

Hi all,

recently I did a sudo pacman -Syu and then the lights went out. I don't know how far the upgrade had proceeded because I was in a different terminal. After the system came back up I repeated the pacman command and it said everything was up to date. Until a few days later I didn't notice anything except vim stopped working. Just did nothing when I typed "vim" at the command line. I tried to reinstall vim and got a lot of file conflicts (I don't know what they said because they don't show up in /var/log/pacman.log). Same when I did sudo pacman -Syu again. So I added --overwrite '*' and this went fine. Same with the vim reinstall except syntax highlighting didn't work any more. Uninstalled and reinstalled vim, same thing. I then uninstalled vim, deleted all of /usr/share/vim, reinstalled vim. Weirdly, the directory /usr/share/vim was not created again. Also, each call to pacman gives hals a dozen messages like "ldconfig: File /usr/lib/libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1.so.0.6.9 is empty, not checked."

So far the only annoying thing is that vim doesn't do syntax highlighting any more and pacman doesn't reinstall its files, but I think that more than that is wrong. Any way to fix this?

Last edited by musbur (2024-10-03 12:05:44)

Lone_Wolf · 2024-10-02 10:13:45

Using pacman -Syu --overwrite '*' is a VERY BAD IDEA , never do it again .

Next time pacman crashes during an update, look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … an_upgrade before doing anything else .

Please run as root (or with root rights)

pacman -Qkk

and post the full output.

seth · 2024-10-02 13:43:37

That's gonna be a lot of lines w/ no relevant data (0 files altered), try

sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk  2> /tmp/howbadisit.txt
cat /tmp/howbadisit.txt | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

musbur · 2024-10-03 12:11:33

Thanks for the reply. Even after years or Arch I still underestimate the Wiki. Should've looked there first. Anyway, I ended up reinstalling all packages as suggested there, and it turns out that really only vim-runtime and one other package had been broken.

If I I understand the warning about --overwrite correctly, the risk is that it will clobber configuration files that I may have changed. Like /etc/fstab as a particularly annoying example. Can it also break something that is outside the package being reinstalled?

Arch Linux

#1 2024-10-01 16:33:53

[SOLVED] System wonky after laptop battery died during system update

#2 2024-10-02 10:13:45

Re: [SOLVED] System wonky after laptop battery died during system update

#3 2024-10-02 13:43:37

Re: [SOLVED] System wonky after laptop battery died during system update

#4 2024-10-03 12:11:33

Re: [SOLVED] System wonky after laptop battery died during system update

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