Pacman looking for pacman.conf in the wrong place?

Question

When using yaourt, I had been getting an error message to do with pacman.conf not being found. I fixed this by creating my own and saving it in
/usr/local/etc/pacman.conf
(it's the only file in /usr/local/etc)
I then got the error message:
failed to initialize alpm library (could not find or read directory)
After some googling and learning about the find command, I found the following files:
/usr/lib/libalpm.so
/usr/lib/libalpm.so.8
/usr/lib/pkgconfig/libalpm.pc
/usr/lib/libalpm.so.8.0.2
So I'm guessing that I do have the alpm library, but pacman (or Yaourt?) isn't finding it.
Further use of 'find' found the following versions of pacman:
/usr/local/etc/pacman.conf
/etc/pacman.conf
Which then lead me to believe that I have the necessary files but they are in the wrong place or there is a config file (or something) that I need to alter.
Any ideas what I've done wrong and how to correct it?
Thanks, James

Answer 1

I've just tried
pacman -S man-pages
as a test, and it worked ok.
So, Bug Wrangler is probably right. Any ideas how I fix it, or is the solution to start again? If I need to start again, is there an easy way to remove yaourt?
Last edited by james13 (2014-10-05 18:57:00)