Arch Linux

quantumphaze

Member

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 175

[Solved] Pacman puked zero byte files everywhere

Earlier this week I upgraded stuff and all of a sudden X would not start. After endless searching (in elinks of course) I gave up and downgraded a few xorg packages. I upgraded them again later to find what specific package was the culprit and to my surprise everything worked without a hitch. I suspected that the xorg-xkb-utils may have been installed incorrectly

Yesterday I needed to use ssh, but it wouldn't work at all. As if all my commands were going down a black hole in the bash prompt.

[andrew@sl500 ~]$ ssh
[andrew@sl500 ~]$

I ls -l it and right next to /usr/bin/ssh is a big fat 0.
Reinstalling with pacman -S ssh fixed it. The .tar.gz.pkg files are fine, it's the extraction process that is breaking things.

"Great" I thought, "I wonder how many other packages are broken like this?"

I ran the Kfind thing and set it to find * with file size 0. It returned 3645 results! Some of them are .h files from the kernel sources. Many are in /usr/bin like xterm.

I really don't know what else to do other than manually querying every file in Pacman and reinstalling.

I would ask that others run a search for any zero byte files. If this effects others then we can make a useful bug report.

Last edited by quantumphaze (2009-11-06 03:17:48)

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byte

Member

From: Düsseldorf (DE)

Registered: 2006-05-01

Posts: 2,046

Re: [Solved] Pacman puked zero byte files everywhere

> If this effects others then we can make a useful bug report.

Already done: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/11639

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quantumphaze

Member

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2008-11-14

Posts: 175

Re: [Solved] Pacman puked zero byte files everywhere

How silly of me.

Anyway, that bug report says to run this to find the effected packages.

find /var/lib/pacman/local/ -name files -size 0

Just to warn everyone I reinstalled them but 4 kdemod packages keep coming up. Turns out the packages have no files in them at all (if this is a bug, it's completely unrelated to the one at hand and Chakra's problem).

The other 3000 zero byte files appear to be intentional since most are kernel .h header files. Things work again, case closed(ish).

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