[solved] What happens if you quit a busy pacman

Question

This might be a silly question but I cannot find an answer anywhere,
What happens if I ctl-c while pacman is removing or installing packages?
Will I be left with a half installed package?
for example, I was removing the 'gnome' group the other day and cancelled the process midway through the removal, pacman then later did not think that 'gnome' was installed, so I had to re-install gnome to remove everything again, if that makes sense?
Last edited by jrussell (2013-05-12 18:37:06)

Answer 1

It makes sense that you thought that you had to re-install gnome to remove it, because you do not seem to know about the group search options for -Q (man page), as well as you need to be told, that you can put a pacman command in a pacman command ("pacman -Xy $(pacman -Nm)") to let pacman tell pacman what to do.
You might but you should not end up with a half installed package. It seems like C-c is a rather friendly request by the shell, asking the process politely to stop whatever it is doing, as soon as it is done with critical things. (Look up "signals" in Unix). If pacman is a well-made piece of software, it should not leave half its dirt behind.
In your case you were only removing a group. There is no reference to installed groups (or at least not as far as I know), there are only packages in that group. I guess the dependencies of those packages were not in that group, so those were left installed upon interrupting pacman so impolitely.