I just installed pacman log viewer @dalto, a suggestion if you think it might help you any.
a ‘monkey’ is a worker - a thread - a function - and I think you are seeing those due to some debug message not being suppressed for one reason or another.
No, I checked that first even though where it happens in the output doesn’t seem consistent with hooks which typically are pre or post transaction.
I have some functions related to yay but there is nothing there. Also, I am not sure how easy it would be for a function to interfere mid-run like that.
I also tried switching shells to ensure none of my functions were running.
Nothing I have done deliberately.
I haven’t changed it, I tried clean building and reinstalling yay just to be sure.
At that point i have cracked in half.
Well at least mystery of WHY monkey?!?! is solved 
But where… 
But why monkey? Why not frog? 
I suspect because frogs don’t often cause trouble! I never got accused of frogging around with something… 
Because monkeys are way cooler. 
I’ll wait for “I could use some help finding these frogs” thread
Well, the grep of /usr returned 2,476 results. I didn’t see anything obvious there.
The grep of /home has been running for 2.5 hours so far.
Silly question here - isn’t Catfish quicker on such things?
I haven’t done any performance testing but I assume catfish is faster because it has built an index ahead of time?
In my case, I don’t have catfish installed so I would need to build the whole index first.
Well, that’s a constant for me, so no point in opening a thread.
@dalto I’ll have you know, sir, that frogs, like all other amphibians, are cold blooded animals, which makes them objectively cooler than monkeys.
HA!
OK, here is an interesting piece of data. It doesn’t happen when I login or su to root and use pacman.
It does happen if I use sudo pacman
I switched my shell to sh and ssh’d in and it still happens so it isn’t anything in my .zshrc.
Try colorful frogs if you can
Create a new account, check if it happens there. If not, copy dot files and folders from existing account over. Check again. 
What is your sudo?
type sudo
ssh’d in
So your ssh is compromised? 
Or you could search for sed commands like:
... | sed 's|[ALPM-SCRIPTLET]|[ALPM-SCRIPTLET] monkey|'
Compromised, or monkey-enhanced? 
Have you got anything in your $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, $PYTHON_PATH or similar?
dotfiles? pam.d? sudoers.d? /etc/environment?
Found it!
No frogs found yet though.
ripgrep is very fast.