MacPorts 2.6.2 broke during upgrades

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 22, 2019, at 12:38, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> my MacPorts
> broke in a very strange way. I was upgrading selectively some ports (because certain are hard failures currently on 10.7) ehen upgrade of python36 broke (strangely, it worked on 10.6!).
> 
> I cannot even list outdated packages, look:
> 
> $ sudo port list outdated
> sudo: Can't mkdir /var/db/sudo/multix: File exists

This is certainly odd. It sounds like it is trying to create the directory /var/db/sudo/multix but a file or directory of that name already exists. You might try deleting the file or directory /var/db/sudo/multix (or at least temporarily renaming it to something else) and see if that helps anything.

A similar problem was reported on reddit some years ago. In that instance, the problem appears to have been a bad hard drive. You might check your disk with Disk Utility and use some other method of verifying the drive's SMART status, and make sure you have current backups just in case.

https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/26x4ny/cant_mkdir_vardbsudousername_file_exists/chz26cj/

I also want to point out that there is no need to use sudo when performing read-only operations like listing ports, and also that "list outdated" is probably not the command you want to run; the command you probably want is "outdated". See https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#portlist.