On Catalina, what should /private/tmp look like?
Here is how my Catalina machine looks:

Charlie:/ sfederman$ ls -lA /tmp /private/
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  admin  11 Jul 16 14:05 /tmp -&gt; private/tmp

/private/:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  86 root  wheel  2752 Oct 19 19:43 etc
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel    64 Jul  6 01:22 tftpboot
drwxrwxrwt   9 root  wheel   288 Oct 21 10:59 tmp
drwxr-xr-x  28 root  wheel   896 Oct  4 10:24 var


So:


Yes, /tmp is a softlink to /private/tmp
/private/tmp is a directory.