`bun install -g bun` breaks bun, writes empty file to node_modules/.bin/bun.exe globally

[kisaragi-hiu]

What version of Bun is running?

1.1.27+267afa293

What platform is your computer?

Linux 6.8.0-40-generic x86_64 x86_64

What steps can reproduce the bug?

• Install Bun through the install script, in self-managed mode (not sure if this is necessary)

• Install a package globally. Wait for it to succeed.

  bun add -g svelte-language-server

• The bun command now does nothing. whereis bun shows it's still in ~/.bun/bin/bun, but opening that file / symlink shows an empty file. Evidently the result of the postinstall trick described in ~/.bun/install/global/node_modules/bun/bin/README.txt:

  The 'bun.exe' file is a placeholder for the binary file, which is replaced by Bun's 'postinstall' script. For this to work, make sure that you do not use --ignore-scripts while installing.

  ... has been destroyed.

What is the expected behavior?

Bun stays around, installing a global package does not destroy the installation.

What do you see instead?

Bun self-destructs after installing a global package.

Additional information

No response

[Jarred-Sumner]

This is caused by running bun install -g bun, which writes an empty bun.exe file into $PATH which somehow leads to running that version of bun instead

[kisaragi-hiu]

To clarify, I did not directly run bun install -g bun to trigger this. However, my global package.json (~/.bun/install/global/package.json) does turn out to have an entry for Bun, and removing it stops this behavior.

A search in my shell history showed that I did run bun install -g bun at some point (my global package.json suggests it's when 1.1.10 was latest), and that that was the last time I ran bun install -g before today.

So the error here is

• If the user runs bun install -g bun (arguably a mistake), bun becomes an empty file
• After a reinstall, all invocations to bun install -g will trigger the same behavior, until the user manually removes bun from ~/.bun/install/global/package.json