Nix install with curl fails if /nix already exists

Development
1

The first time installing with curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh works fine (asks for sudo), but if we run it a second time it will fail with permission denied when trying to access /nix and it doesn’t prompt for sudo in the second case.

I was trying to start from scratch, to see if I could avoid the duplicate search issue, so I delete all ~/.nix-* folders and tried the curl command again, then got permission denied.

I deleted the /nix folder then I was able to try again successfully.

Maybe a better error message should be thrown in this case, or maybe it should just ask for sudo again and do what it needs to do?

2

AFAIK the install script just uses sudo every time, and you only get prompted once because sudo caches credentials for 5 minutes within a given shell session (by default).

3

@lilyball The problem is if /nix already exists in the filesystem before running curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh, then the install script does not attempt to use sudo and it fails when it tries to do anything with the /nix folder.

4

Opened an issue for it at Nix install with curl fails if /nix already exists · Issue #3309 · NixOS/nix · GitHub.