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 on my Arch Linux system. During this testing, I had to repeatedly reinstall and downgrade Python 2.x, Python 3.x, and several other Python dependency packages. At some point, this caused my Arch Linux installation to break, and pacman stopped working. Every time I ran pacman, I got the following error: "pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libidn2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".

In addition to pacman, several other applications like pacaur, yaourt, packer, VirtualBox, and Transmission also stopped working. Whenever I tried to open any of these programs, I got the error: 'error while loading shared libraries: libidn2.so.0: cannot open shared object file.'

I suspect I may have accidentally uninstalled something, though I can't remember what. Unfortunately, this is my personal system, and I want to avoid reinstalling the OS because it has many applications. Reinstalling everything would take at least two days, if not more.

After frantically searching the Arch Linux wiki and other Linux forums, I finally managed to fix it. If you ever encounter a similar problem, don’t waste time searching - just download the source file and copy the missing file(s) to the `/usr/lib/` folder. From everything I found online, this method seems to be the easiest solution. Keep reading to learn how I fixed the error.

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

Method 1: Using pacman-static

As one of the commenter mentioned in the comment section, we can use "pacman-static" package from AUR. It is a pre-compiled binary. You can simply download it, make it executable, and reinstall the missing shared libraries.

Step 1: download the precompiled binaries from from this link.

curl -O https://pkgbuild.com/~morganamilo/pacman-static/x86_64/bin/pacman-static

Step 2: Make it executable:

chmod +x pacman-static

Step 3: Reinstall pacman:

sudo ./pacman-static -S pacman

Step 4: Reinstall missing shared libraries:

sudo pacman -S libidn2 --force

Replace 'libidn2' with the missing library.

That's it.

If this method doesn't work for any reason, follow the 2nd method.

Method 2: The manual way

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

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 Fix Broken Pacman In Arch Linux
• How To Restore Broken Arch Linux To Previous Working State
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• How To Solve “error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)” In Arch Linux