yum Command Doesn't Work Because 'Another app is currently holding the yum lock'

Another behavior of foolish Linux (Fedora Core mostly) is it cannot automatically disable yum when it is busy for no reason!

Hence, you might face this messages after applying an yum command!

Existing lock /var/run/yum.pid: another copy is running as pid 6302. Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit... The other application is: yum Memory : 17 M RSS ( 32 MB VSZ) Started: Fri Dec 18 18:50:55 2009 - 02:39 ago State : Sleeping, pid: 6302 Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit... The other application is: yum Memory : 17 M RSS ( 32 MB VSZ) Started: Fri Dec 18 18:50:55 2009 - 02:41 ago State : Sleeping, pid: 6302 ...................................... ......................................

Now what? Well, as the OS is foolish we have to take the control! Kill the boring yum running in background and force it to do our work! That's it.

Note the pid from the message. Look in my case it is 6302. So I'll apply this command.

# kill -9 6302

This will kill the process blocking yum. Now reenter the previous yum command that you wanted to perform.