Linux Boot – Fix ‘A Start Job is Running for Create Volatile Files and Directories’

bootlinuxtmpubuntu-18.04

I think something generated millions of files or folders in my /tmp on Ubuntu 18.04, as I'm unable to run ls /tmp or even rm -rf /tmp/*. So I tried rebooting, but now my machine's stuck at the step:

A start job is running for Create Volatile Files and Directories

I let it run for 10 hours, and it's still going, so it's likely swapping to disk and will never complete. What do I do? How do I clear my /tmp folder if I can't even boot the system?

Edit: I appended "systemd.debug-shell=1 systemd.show_status=false" so I could get to a shell. Then I killed the systemd-tmpfiles process and then ran mkdir /empty; time rsync -a --delete /empty/ /tmp/ to do a fast delete as suggested here. However, after 30 minutes, it's still running.

Best Answer

You can boot in single user mode, move the tmp folder, create a new clean one, set the permissions and reboot. Then you can do whatever needs to be done with the old tmp.

in the single user session do:

mv /tmp /old.tmp
mkdir /tmp
chmod 1777 /tmp

and reboot.

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