Cannot make directory '/var/run/screen': Permission denied

Found a solution that doesn't require regular sudo on restarts

From 'Eric Z Ma' @ systutorials:

The directory /var/run/screen/ is the socket directory for screen.

Fortunately, screen reads a environment variable SCREENDIR to get an alternative socket directory.

So to work around it, you can create a directory, such as ~/.screen:

mkdir ~/.screen && chmod 700 ~/.screen

and export the SCREENDIR to point to that directory:

export SCREENDIR=$HOME/.screen

You can also put this line into you ~/.bashrc so that it will also take effect afterwards.

This issue has been documented here. In short,

/etc/rcS.d/S70screen-cleanup is running via upstart much earlier than it expects to have run, and is failing to correctly clean up that directory.

It can be fixed with the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/screen-cleanup start

I ran into this while running a Centos / RHEL 7 based distro, and it doesn't have anything named 'screen-cleanup' anywhere under /etc.

A workaround I found was to simply run sudo screen and then immediately exit from it.

After that I was able to run screen without any special privileges, so it appears to clean up /var/run approriately up when given the chance.