nano stuck in never-never land

I was editing smb.conf via PUTTY when I lost power on the machine I was using PUTTY on. Now when I try to get back into the file it tells me it is currently open by root. I've tried restarting the server, but no luck. 16.04 Server 32bit.

Are you working from a Linux machine?

If so, could you post the exact results of attempting to open the file with nano from the command line?

Thanks.

Try:

Code:

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ps ax | grep nano

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The result should look something like this:

Code:

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ps ax | grep nano
14427 pts/1    S+    0:00 nano blame.txt
14457 pts/2    S+    0:00 grep --color=auto nano

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as you can see the in the first instance I have a file called blame.txt open, and the PID is 14427. If nano is unresponsive kill it using:

Code:

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sudo kill 14427

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the PID on your system will be different, but the principle is the same.

I just tried the method described by cariboo with no success
here is the message I get when trying to open smb.conf with nano from the main terminal
"file smb.conf is being edited (by root with nano 2.5.3 PID 2169)

I don't have any data on this install, so I'll just reinstall.

Did you try

Code:

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sudo kill 2169

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