I had installed python 3.5 using yay (an installer for packages from Arch’s AUR packages)
since it didn’t exist in the pacman repos, after removing that package, I started having issues with pip because it was
bound to the python35 package which no longer existed.
I looked up how to figure out which package owned the pip file and found this command:
$ sudo pacman -Qo /usr/bin/pip
error: No package owns /usr/bin/pip
That’s good, that means I just need to remove the file.
$ sudo rm /usr/bin/pip3
And then install the proper python-pip package…
$ sudo pacman -S python-pip
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
python-pip: /usr/bin/pip3 exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
But that didn’t work because the file pip3 (from the old python35 package) was still installed. I just repeated the
same thing I did to python35 to check that it was not owned by any pacman package, and fortunately, that was the only
last file I needed to purge.
Now I was left with a clean system, and I can install python-pip normally with:
$ sudo pacman -S python-pip