Geth is not generating an IPC file, cannot attach

Question

I'm new to Ethereum so I am doing a course on it to learn how to develop decentralized apps.

I have Geth 1.6.1 and Mist.

According to the course I created a directory 'chaindata', then when starting geth --datadir chaindata it gives me this output:

MacBook-Pro-van-Lise-Lotte:Ethereum Lise-Lotte$ geth --datadir chaindata
WARN [05-28|12:07:53] No etherbase set and no accounts found as default 
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Starting peer-to-peer node               instance=Geth/v1.6.1-stable-021c3c28/darwin-amd64/go1.8.3
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Allocated cache and file handles         database=/Users/Lise-Lotte/Documents/Jairo/Ethereum/chaindata/geth/chaindata cache=128 handles=1024
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Initialised chain configuration          config="{ChainID: 15 Homestead: 0 DAO: <nil> DAOSupport: false EIP150: <nil> EIP155: 0 EIP158: 0 Engine: unknown}"
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Disk storage enabled for ethash caches   dir=/Users/Lise-Lotte/Documents/Jairo/Ethereum/chaindata/geth/ethash count=3
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Disk storage enabled for ethash DAGs     dir=/Users/Lise-Lotte/.ethash                                        count=2
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Initialising Ethereum protocol           versions="[63 62]" network=1
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Loaded most recent local header          number=0 hash=2fb1a7…f0181a td=131072
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Loaded most recent local full block      number=0 hash=2fb1a7…f0181a td=131072
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Loaded most recent local fast block      number=0 hash=2fb1a7…f0181a td=131072
INFO [05-28|12:07:53] Starting P2P networking 
INFO [05-28|12:07:55] RLPx listener up                         self=enode://a84c9a13453cc4639dabc8e82729fa51f9165978682471053966f5e328b31acc4a81490b20d8e0db6a99769ce6543c910cb4531907bec94f7072a7e8c3d880a0@[::]:30303
INFO [05-28|12:07:55] IPC endpoint opened: /Users/Lise-Lotte/Documents/Jairo/Ethereum/chaindata/geth.ipc

But the geth.ipc file is never created so I can not attach. I searched for similar answers but I couldn't find one that works.

Please help, I'm hoping to continue my course ;)

Answer 1

The .ipc file is created but in a non-default directory since you specified it with the --datadir option. If you want to attach another console to it, repeat the same option such as geth --datadir chaindata attach.

Alternatively you can specify the .ipc file's path as follows: geth --datadir chaindata --ipcpath another/directory.