I usually update Arch Linux twice a week. Today I updated and issued: $pacman -Syu It proceeded to download the packages but stopped at: Error:{package}/path/to/file already exists in the filesystem could not proceed with update. Taken from wiki.archlinux.org/pacman Why this is happening: pacman has detected a file conflict, and by design, will not overwrite files for you. This is a design feature, not a flaw. The issue is usually trivial to solve. A safe way is to first check if another package owns the file ( pacman -Qo /path/to/file ). If the file is owned by another package, file a bug report . If the file is not owned by another package, rename the file which 'exists in filesystem' and re-issue the update command. If all goes well, the file may then be removed. If you had installed a program manually without using pacman or a frontend, you have to remove it and all its files and reinstall properly using pacman. Every installed package
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