Software updater has crashed

Question

Have been using 14.04 LTS for years with no problems. Have tried sudo apt-get update and get:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

As a new poster but long time Ubuntu User I upvoted your question and answer to give you more rep :). But sadly I had to vote your question as a duplicate :( — WinEunuuchs2Unix, Dec 23 '18 at 21:31

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 23 '18 at 21:24

1

Panic over, all seems to be working fine after I closed down and restarted.

Do not know why this has happened.

answered Dec 23 '18 at 21:24

alanb

33

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 23 '18 at 21:34

Usually your system or apt is doing some work behind the scenes so when you try to access the /var/lib[apt|dpkg] and the system has a lock on this location you get those errors.

Now to see who or what is holding that lock you can run:

sudo lslocks | grep -E "/var/lib/dpkg/lock"

Software updater has crashed

2 Answers2