Using pacman

This page describes how to use pacman, the package manager for Arch Linux.

Install a package

The syntax for this is pacman -Syu <package> where <package> shall be replaced by the name of the package you’d like to install. For unprivileged users this should be preceded by sudo.

i.e. with the following command, an unprivileged user will install package grep (assuming sudo is installed and the user is part of the wheel group):

sudo pacman -Syu grep

Always do a full upgrade (pacman -Syu) when installing packages. Arch Linux doesn’t support partial upgrades.

Alias to update and purge

To update everything, including systemd-nspawn containers in /var/lib/machines, and purge the pacman cache afterwards, you could create an alias update as normal user as follows:

tee -a ~/.bashrc <<EOF
alias update='sudo pacman -Syu; sudo sh -c "for d in /var/lib/machines/*/; do echo \$d; pacman -Syur \$d; done"; paccache -vrk 2'
EOF

Troubleshooting

Invalid or corrupted package

sudo rm /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*.part