How To Fix “pacman: error while loading shared libraries” Error In Arch Linux

For the past few days, I have been extensively testing PIP and Pipenv tools in my Arch Linux system. While testing these tools, I had to reinstall and downgrade Python2.x, Python 3.x packages and some other Python dependencies package many times. At some point, It broke my Arch Linux and pacman stopped working. Whenever I run pacman, I got an error that says "pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libidn2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".

pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libidn2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Not just pacman, some other applications, such as pacaur, yaourt, packer, virtualbox and transmission etc., also stopped working. When I try to open any one of these applications, I keep getting this message - "error while loading shared libraries: libidn2.so.0: cannot open shared object file".

Chances are that I may have uninstall something that I couldn't remember. To my bad luck, It was my personal system and I don't want to reinstall it because it has a lot of applications. So, reinstalling OS and all applications might took two or may be more days.

After vigorously searching on Arch Linux wiki and other Linux forums like a mad man, I finally managed to fixed it. If you ever run into a problem something like this, look nowhere, just download the source file and copy the missing file(s) to /usr/lib/ folder. As far as I searched on the web, this method seems very easiest one so far. Read on to know how I fixed this error.

Fix "pacman: error while loading shared libraries" Error In Arch Linux

As I said already, I kept getting this error - "pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libidn2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" when I run pacman command or any AUR helpers such as pacaur, packer, yaourt and I even can't open VirtualBox application and Transmission client. So, the actual problem here is the file "libidn2.so.0" has gone missing. We need to find it out!

$ ls -la /usr/lib/libidn*

Sample output from my Arch Linux system:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jul 22 2013 /usr/lib/libidnkitlite.so -> libidnkitlite.so.1.0.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jul 22 2013 /usr/lib/libidnkitlite.so.1 -> libidnkitlite.so.1.0.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 276352 Jul 22 2013 /usr/lib/libidnkitlite.so.1.0.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Jul 22 2013 /usr/lib/libidnkit.so -> libidnkit.so.1.0.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Jul 22 2013 /usr/lib/libidnkit.so.1 -> libidnkit.so.1.0.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 282368 Jul 22 2013 /usr/lib/libidnkit.so.1.0.2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Aug 15 19:00 /usr/lib/libidn.so -> libidn.so.11.6.16
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Aug 15 19:00 /usr/lib/libidn.so.11 -> libidn.so.11.6.16
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 210872 Aug 15 19:00 /usr/lib/libidn.so.11.6.16

I had "libidn.so", but can't find "libidn2.so.0". Since pacman and any other package manager didn't work, there is no way to install, upgrade or downgrade any packages from official repository or local cache. So, I thought that the only way might be to download the package that has the missing file from Internet, extract it and finally copy the missing file(s) to /usr/lib/ directory. Let me create a directory to save libdin2 tar file:

$ mkdir libidn

$ cd libidn

Find and download the latest version of this package. A quick google search brought me here. Extract the file:

$ tar xf libidn2-2.0.4-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

The above command extracted the contents of the file in a directory named "usr". Go to the usr/lib folder: (Note - It is usr/lib, not /usr/lib)

$ cd usr/lib

Finally copy the missing file, in our case it is libidn2.so.0, to /usr/lib/ directory of your Arch Linux system.

$ sudo cp libidn2.so.0 /usr/lib/

Then, I ran:

$ sudo pacman -syu

Update Arch Linux

Voila! Pacman works now!! Oops! Oh no, wait.. It didn't work. I got this error after few minutes.

[....]
(511/511) checking keys in keyring [######################] 100%
(511/511) checking package integrity [######################] 100%
(511/511) loading package files [######################] 100%
(511/511) checking for file conflicts [######################] 100%
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
libidn2: /usr/lib/libidn2.so.0 exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

To fix this, I ran:

$ sudo pacman -S libidn2 --force

Then, I tried update again:

$ sudo pacman -Syu

Fixed!! All good now. So, if you guys ever run into an issue something like "error while loading shared libraries: .. cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory", one way to fix this is to find the the package that contains the missing files, download the latest version of that package, extract it and copy the missing files to /usr/lib/ directory. Of course, there could be many ways to fix such kind of issues. But this is the only working solution I could find and I find this much easier and faster. This trick might work on other Linux distros too.

Related read:

• How To Restore Broken Arch Linux To Previous Working State
• How To Fix “unable to lock database” Error In Arch Linux
• How To Fix “invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)” Error In Arch Linux
• How To Solve “Starting full system upgrade… there is nothing to do” Issue In Arch Linux
• How To Solve “error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)” In Arch Linux