Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock' (38)

Question

I am having a big problem trying to connect to mysql. When I run:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql start

I have the following error :

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Answer 1

As can be seen by the many answers here, there are lots of problems that can result in this error message when you start the MySQL service. The thing is, MySQL will generally tell you exactly what's wrong, if you just look in the appropriate log file.

For example, on Ubuntu, you should check /var/log/syslog. Since lots of other things might also be logging to this file, you probably want to use grep to look at mysql messages, and tail to look at only the most recent. All together, that might look like:

grep mysql /var/log/syslog | tail -50

Don't blindly make changes to your configuration because someone else said 'This worked for my system.' Figure out what is actually wrong with your system and you'll get a better result much faster.