Arch Linux pacaur¶

AUR helper wrapping pacman, driven through the pacaur binary.

Inherits every operation, parser and forced argument from Pacman; only the binary and version probe differ. Routing through pacaur is what lets --query --upgrades report AUR updates on top of the official repositories.

Unlike pacman, the helper must run as the regular user: it aborts under root (you cannot perform this operation as root) because makepkg refuses to build as root, and it invokes sudo pacman itself for the privileged steps. mpm therefore never wraps it in sudo.

Home page: https://github.com/E5ten/pacaur
Source: meta_package_manager/managers/pacman.py
Version requirement: >=4.0.0

Platforms¶

🅱️ BSD
🐧 Linux
⨂ Unix

Operations¶

Operation	Supported	Notes
`installed`	✓
`outdated`	✓
`search`	✓	extended search backfilled by `mpm`
`install`	✓
`upgrade`	✓
`upgrade_all`	✓
`remove`	✓
`sync`	✓
`cleanup`	✓

Ecosystem¶

Accepted purl types: pkg:alpm, pkg:pacaur

Usage¶

$ mpm --pacaur installed
$ mpm --pacaur search "query"
$ mpm --pacaur upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:pacaur/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --pacaur upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-pacaur, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line¶

CLI names, in lookup order: pacaur
Arguments forced before each call: --noconfirm --color never

The version is probed by running:

$ pacaur --version
pacaur 4.8.6

and extracted with:

r"pacaur\s+(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation¶

Arch Linux pacaur runs sudo from inside its own commands: mpm never wraps it, keeps an already-warm credential cache alive for those internal escalations, and warns when a mutating call goes silent on a terminal with a cold cache, since a password prompt may be hiding in the stream.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown¶

State of Arch Linux pacaur’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None (Arch AUR helper)

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.