Drush up error - unable to untar - Destination already exsists

Question

I have verified that the directory does not exist before attempting an update. The error I get is as follows.

Do you really want to continue? (y/n): y
Executing: svn info /home/sites/lg/public_html/drupal-7.26
Executing: bzr root /home/sites/lg/public_html/drupal-7.26
Executing: wget -q --timeout=30 -O /tmp/download_filexptX5V http://ftp.drupal.org /files/projects/drupal-7.26.tar.gz
Downloading drupal-7.26.tar.gz was successful.                                                                                                    [notice]
Md5 checksum of drupal-7.26.tar.gz verified.                                                                                                      [notice]
Mime type for /home/sites/lg/public_html/drupal-7.26.tar.gz is application/x-gzip                                                                 [notice]
Executing: tar -C /home/sites/lg/public_html -xzf drupal-7.26.tar.gz
Unable to untar /home/sites/lg/public_html/drupal-7.26.tar.gz.                                                                                 [error]
Destination directory /home/sites/lg/public_html/drupal-7.26 already exists.                                                                   [error]
Project drupal was updated successfully. Installed version is now 7.26.

I am on a vps using CentOS 6.5 Drush version 5.9 Currently installed version of Drupal is 7.23

Answer 1

I've had a similar problem in the past. It looks like there's already a /home/sites/lg/public_html/drupal-7.26 (at least based on your post). Make sure you have read / write access to it. Better yet, run drush as root or under sudo.

Answer 2

There were other problems that accompanied this one. They were:

When trying to untar files on the server I got the following message.

tar:: Cannot open: Disk quota exceeded

Cpanel started to give these error messages at different file locations in the update script and was not able to complete a full update.

 E Failed to download /usr/...
 Retrying download (attempt 2/5)
 E Failed to download /usr/...
 Retrying download (attempt 3/5)
 E Failed to download /usr/...
 Retrying download (attempt 4/5)
 E Failed to download /usr/...
 Retrying download (attempt 5/5)
 E Failed to download /usr/...
 The Administrator will be notified to review this output when this script completes
 E Detected events which require user notification during updatenow. Will send iContact the log

I also received the following error from Cpanel updatenow

Running `/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/updatenow --upcp --log=/var/cpanel/updatelogs/update.(...).log`
failed, exited with code 12 (signal = 0)

The problem was due to inode limits being reached on the vps account. Upon further investigation I realized that every time I used drush to update a site it created a new backup of each site. Multiply that times several sites updating several times and you have a ton of files.

The disk quota error is misleading because I was nowhere close to the disk space limit provided by the host. However inodes are basically a file count limit, and with drupal being basically a bunch of small files ... you know the rest.

In short:

Periodically clean temporary files, logs and backups that are safe to delete.

Use the linux df command to check limits

You may also choose to ask your ISP to increase your inode limit.