Unlocking Applications

Your graphical session on a departmental Linux computer may, from time to time, be interrupted by some unforeseen event:

• power disconnection or failure.

• exceeding your quota.

• network outage.
• system crash.

At your next graphical session, you may find that some applications have left behind lock files. If there is no running application associated with these lock files they are considered stale. Their presence may stop subsequent launch of applications that check to prevent more than one application instance being run at a time.

Please find below commands to run in a terminal to remove stale lock files for a number of common applications. After running the relevant commands, you should then be able to launch the affected applications.

Please note: if you have exceeded your quota, you should address that first.

Firefox

cd
\find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name lock -type l -exec rm {} \;
\find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name .parentlock -size 0 -exec rm {} \;

Thunderbird

cd
\find ~/.*thunderbird -name lock -type l -exec rm {} \;
\find ~/.*thunderbird -name .parentlock -size 0 -exec rm {} \;

Google Chrome

\rm -f ~/.config/google-chrome/SingletonLock

If the above does not fix the problem:

mv "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Web Data" \
   "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Web Data.bak" 
mv "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/History" \
   "~/.config/google-chrome/Default/History.bak" 

Chromium

\rm -f ~/.config/chromium/SingletonLock

If the above does not fix the problem:

mv "~/.config/chromium/Default/Web Data" \
  "~/.config/chromium/Default/Web Data.bak" 
mv "~/.config/chromium/Default/History" \
  "~/.config/chromium/Default/History.bak" 

Eclipse

\rm -f ~/workspace/.metadata/.lock