OSX 10.11.3 Update - All Applications Gone - Safe boot as well

RF Acres wrote:

The circumstances of the failure were likely caused by a conflict of the 10.11.3 patch and ClamAV.

Just curious to know how you conclude that ClamAV played a role here. Did you install it from source, OS X server, El Capitan Cache Cleaner, MacPorts or did you mean ClamXav? The reason I ask is that there haven't been any similar reports of such conflict but the /var/folders/ corruption has been brought up several times.

This was my issue as well and this post fixed it!

I DO NOT have ClamAV (I do have Sophos and FileVault enabled). I DID NOT reset PRAM or SMC or uninstall my AV.

I did have a .html file that was associated with Chrome and although I was unable to start Chrome from the Dock and it did not appear under applications but double clicking the HTML file did open Chrome successfully confirming what was said above.

In order to get to a Terminal I renamed one of my executable .sh scripts to .command so the file association would be the terminal. If I double clicked the .sh file it would simply open XCode so was of little use. Once, the extension was ".command" it allowed me to launch the terminal. I was then able to go to the /private/var/folders directory.

I moved all the subfolders to a new folder under my home directory (didn't want to remove them just in case) and I immediately started noticing the folders rebuilding under the /private/var/folders directory. I restarted my Mac and everything returned to normal and was operating properly.

One other note is that the LSD and ReportCrash processes were consuming a decent amount of CPU during the "odd" missing applications time. After moving the /var/folders and restarting this was fixed as well so something strange was going on there.

Thanks to RF Acres for posting this.

Dude you are the MAN! I hate it when Apple just put the most cookie cutter response at the top as the most helpful and that person gets all these points and hasn't actually done jack S**t. Continuing in this stupid game of putting people with more points at the top of the answers instead of actually putting the solution at the top. Your directions worked great and fixed my problem. I just opened my guest user and went to the finder file menu and clicked on go to folder.

Then typed in /private/var/folders and when the finder window popped up I deleted everything except the zz folder and BAM! My computer is snappier and my applications are back.