How to fix the "file-missing: Doing vfork" error in Emacs

Jan 3, 2024 (updated May 28, 2024). 328 words. 2 minutes. Emacs Doom

Introduction #

Sometimes when I am playing around with Doom Emacs modules, running doom sync, or changing plugins, I break things. That is fine, worst case, I delete my config folder and start over, nothing lost but some time. But lately I faced the following error message after restarting Emacs:

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(file-missing Doing vfork No such file or directory)

According to this GitHub issue this is a macOS issue, but well…I am on Linux. The error still comes up, so I want to document the solution I have found.

Solution #

With extended debug tracing ¹, we can see that the error actually comes from sqlite, and so there is one very helpful comment in the previously mentioned GitHub issue, that is mentioning just that:

I got this after upgrading from 28.1 to 28.2 (via emacs-mac on homebrew) and also incidentally upgraded from Monterey 12.5 to 12.6 at the same time — which had its own weirdness with clang not being found, but in my case it was emacsql-sqlite that was causing the issue (not found).

I did this to flush out old 28.1 stuff (not sure if it was necessary)

rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/.local

doom sync

And then manually compiled emacsql-sqlite

cd .emacs.d/.local/straight/build-28.2/emacsql-sqlite/sqlite make

Things seem to be working ok now.

So, yeah, it simply comes down to these steps:

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# Clean up first.
rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/.local

# Make sure, Doom is synced.
doom sync

# Go into the download directory (depends on you Emacs version).
cd .emacs.d/.local/straight/build-29.1/emacsql-sqlite/sqlite

# Manually rebuild the binary.
make

And with that it works again. I had the error multiple times in a row, but this solution fixes it every time. Not sure what the source is, but now it is documented for future me and maybe it is helpful to somebody else coming from a search engine.

Notes #