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luilver
Asked: 2015-06-05 22:07:50 +0800 CST

Tmux new-session returns: "can't create socket"

  • 772

I have killed a byobu session accidentally (kill -9 byobuSessionId), and now when I try to start another byobu command fails with "can't create socket".

Also tmux new-session returns: "can't create socket"

I have tried sudo service screen-cleanup start without success !

Any idea how can I solve it ?

tmux

9 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Problem occurs maybe by dead tmux process if you check output for strace -f -e trace=file tmux command.

    You see socket file created by tmux, in my case is located on /tmp//tmux-1001/default/

    You simply delete this file and run again byobu command.

    • 11

  2. Check the permissions of the /tmp/tmux*/ directories. They should be owned by you and not accessible to anyone else.

    So change permission as:

    chmod 700 -R /tmp/tmux*

    It is important that the socket directory is owned by you and not accessible by everyone, or any user could use your tmux server. For a while, tmux incorrectly skipped the access mode check, this was fixed in 2.0.

    If your system doesn't support creating directories in /tmp with the right ownership, you will have to use -S to point it explicitly to a socket. The check is important and we are not going to support systems that do not have Unix file permission semantics.

    • 5

  3. I encountered the same problem and below is my solution:

    1. Create a new folder: /tmp/$(id -u)
    2. Change owner: chown -R $(id -nu):$(id -nu) /tmp/$(id -u)
    3. Change permission: chmod -R 700 /tmp/$(id -u)

    It works!

    • 1

  4. on mac the those cmds did the trick: 

    sudo rm -r '/tmp/tmux-'$(id -u)
sudo chmod -R 4777 /tmp/
    • 1

  5. The permission of /tmp may causes this problem.

    You can check whether the permission of /tmp is 4777, if not do this:

    $ sudo chmod 4777 /tmp
    • 0

  6. I've came across the same issue on a shared server, where I had no special permissions outside my home directory. It happens that tmux was trying to access ~/tmp folder where to create its socket. That folder was not present and thus the error.

    The solution on my case was to create the folder ~/tmp and all started working fine.

    • 0

  7. I had the same issue, but it is because of disk space issue.

    • 0

  8. Try using this command systemd-tmpfiles --create. It creates some required folders under /run including tmux.

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  9. Using command strace -f -e trace=file tmux you can see what files tmux called. Problem is ofted caused by permissions on /tmp folder. On a standard installation of Ubuntu Server permissions are set to 777. You can change with

    sudo chmod 777 /tmp
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