I encountered this error when trying to do pamac update
from my user:
cp: target '/var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync': Permission denied
ln: failed to access '/var/tmp/pamac/dbs/local': Permission denied
Failed to initialize alpm library (could not open database)
** (pamac:19406): WARNING **: 11:30:42.296: alpm_utils.vala:294: Failed to initialize alpm library
Error: Alpm Error: Failed to initialize alpm library
Number of versions of each package to keep in the cache: 2
To delete: 0 files
Preparing...
cp: target '/var/tmp/pamac/dbs/sync': Permission denied
ln: failed to access '/var/tmp/pamac/dbs/local': Permission denied
Failed to initialize alpm library (could not open database)
** (pamac:19455): WARNING **: 11:30:43.211: alpm_utils.vala:294: Failed to initialize alpm library
Error: Alpm Error: Failed to initialize alpm library
Two points of interest:
(1) if I switch to root, pamac update
works, and it also works using sudo pamac update
; and
(2) sudo pacman --Syu
works fine.
Below are the permissions for /var/tmp/pamac
:
ls -la /var/tmp/pamac/ ✔ 6s
total 24
drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 4096 Sep 3 11:29 ./
drwxrwxrwt 13 root root 4096 Sep 3 11:35 ../
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Sep 3 11:29 aur-root/
drwxr-xr-x 27 roark roark 4096 Sep 3 11:12 aur-rsync/
drw-r--r-- 3 roark roark 4096 Sep 3 11:36 dbs/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4096 Sep 3 11:29 pamac_aur.db