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inac
Asked: 2010-07-30 21:33:08 +0800 CST

YUM lock - other application is... yum?

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When trying to run yum, I get the following error:

Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...

The other application is: yum

I've manually killed each yum process id, but it keeps on occurring (other application is: yum), although the days ago become more recent (used to be 3 days ago, then 1 day ago)..

Any idea what's wrong?

yum

7 Answers

  1. Probably because yum has previously been shutdown uncleanly it's left behind an old lock file.

    Try 

    sudo killall yum
sudo rm /var/run/yum.pid

    then restart yum

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  2. I'm not a Red Hat user so this will be a bit vague; a quick search suggests that there is a yum.lock file somewhere in /var/ - try finding that and/or a yum.pid (or similar) and eliminate them.

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  3. Sure. Two yum processes can't hold the lock at once, or else you'd get corrupt yum metadata and potentially a corrupt RPM database. If you or another admin leave yum running in another session, you'll get this error. Or, perhaps you have something like yum-cron enabled, causing it to periodically be run automatically.

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  4. EDIT: This is Only valid if your running X

    Due to the poise of the question I'd say it may be likely OP, that you have an update window open or may have the package manager open while trying to run yum via shell. This can cause the same result.

    hope this helps if the other answers dont.

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  5. Do you have yum-updatesd set to run on system startup? In my experience this can cause the error you have specified, when it is trying to check for and install updates in the background as you are attempting to use yum from the command line.

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  6. This can be caused by yum-updatesd when a proxy is required but not set in yum.conf. The service tries to check for updates, gets hung and then just sits there.

    Also, as previously mentioned, if you're running X and there's a popup about available packages, that can hog the lock.

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  7. Easy way to fix this issue

     rm -f /var/run/yum.pid
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