Authentication token lock busy

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This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and assertions some of which may well be wrong, and not verified as a whole. Feel free to add or refine.

This usually happens when you are trying to change a password while the root filesystem (or wherever /etc is) is mounted read-only, for example when you booted up using the init trick, or in some maintenance mode/runlevel.

You can do an in-place re-mount of a filesystem. One of the uses of that fact is changing a read-only to be read-write, using:

mount -o remount,rw /

(Another use is using remount,ro, when you want to fsck a filesystem and the relevant fscker requires the filesystem being read-only)