BTW ~ Do not think this is related to “Issue with mkinitcpio” as my other four manjaro systems updated without problems. All but one of the five manjaro systems is updated daily. I use command line update except today used GUI pamac-daemon because of libcanberra-streamer conflict.
In any case thanks for the fix, the last time I had to do this was on a long since deprecated xubuntu system (back when the dead sea was just sick )