problem with bash when upgrading readline

Tricky — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:48:10 +0000

If you ever find yourself updating a single application in Arch Linux (a very bad idea, btw) and it upgrades readline you might end up seeing an error along the lines of:
/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Hopefully you still have a bash prompt open and you haven’t closed them all. If you still can, immediately run the following:
pacman -S bash
else you won’t be able to run bash any more because bash would still be linking to the old version of readline.

Also, in future, don’t run
pacman -Sy application
(python in my case)
instead, run:
pacman -Syu
which will ensure that all applications are upgraded.

Personally, I think that bash should have had a dependency set saying that it required the old specific version of readline and the same for the new bash, requiring the new version of readline. Regardless, rather play it safe.

Dogma » readline

problem with bash when upgrading readline