When running podman ps I get the following error:

Error: configure storage: mkdir /home/myuser/.local/share/containers/storage/overlay/l: file exists

Any idea how I can ensure this error won't happen again? I'm not sure how it happened.

I'm not really sure what to make of that other that guessing that something's gone wrong with podman's internal state handling. Did something you ran recently crash maybe? (I'm assuming podman ps used to work for you, right?)

My kneejerk reaction is "try rebooting". If it persists there might be something odd going on with file permissions perhaps?

I tried rebooting thinking that could fix it as well, possibly to match mismatched kernel versions, but no changes to responses.

If I try to podman start a service, the command will sometimes hang for a bit, but always ends with the same mkdir error as the podman ps error above.

Is the path a file or something? On my system the corresponding path is a directory with a bunch of symlinks in it. The directory has user/group matching my account with permissions set to 755. (i.e. rwxr-xr-x)