Restore pacman local database

Support
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1

Hello, Pacman’s database of installed software, /var/lib/pacman/local, has been deleted from my PC. So, I’m trying to restore it by following the steps prescribed here. I do have the /var/log/pacman.log and the /var/lib/pacman/local/ALPM_DB_VERSION files on my system.

However, in the first step, it says to “Install the pacman-contrib package to get paclog-pkglist.”
How do I do that? Since doing sudo pacman -S pacman-contrib tries to install the required dependencies too, but they are already installed (pacman doesn’t know that of course). And so it raises the “already exists in the filesystem” error.

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sudo pacman -Syu pacman-contrib --overwrite "/var/lib/pacman/local/*" && sudo pacman -Fy
3

Nope. Still the same “[…] exists in filesystem” error

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And you can reinstall all installed packages the same way. But you don’t even have to do that, there is --dbonly. Check man pacman.

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The problem is that we don’t know what state your system is in. Therefore, I can give you a quick fix, but it is dangerous, not recommended unless one knows what one is doing, and it could also completely ruin your system. :point_down:

sudo pacman -Syu pacman-contrib --overwrite "*" && sudo pacman -Fy
2 Likes
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If you have timeshift, then why not restore the most recent snapshot from before you messed up your system?

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You do know that you can run timeshift from the command line as well, don’t you? :confused:

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