spacemacs warning: directory is unsafe

Question

I received this error whenever I start spacemacs

error: The directory `/var/folders/2g/9ndwhk353n97d5vgcqdpsz580000gr/T//emacs504' is unsafe

It seems like no one has had this problem before. It is probably due to I did chflag on some directory sometime ago, but I couldn't remember what I did exactly..

I'm on Mac and my spacemacs is in the latest version.

Answer 1

I got this error for /tmp/emacs... directory for using Spacemacs based on Cgywin Emacs 26.1. Just removing the directory and then restart of emacs did not solve the problem for me. But simply changing the access rights for the directory using chmod g-rwx /tmp/emacs... did the job.

Answer 2

Not seen that specific error before, but Emacs tends to complain about directories being 'unsafe' when someone other than the user currently running Emacs owns or has access to the directory.

See this other Stackoverflow question for a Windows example:

Emacs - Error when calling (server-start))

In your case, I would just delete the emacs504 folder, as emacs probably will recreate it with the correct perms since it's in /var/.