nano stuck in never-never land

[jmill00]

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.

[QIII]

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.

[cariboo]

Try:

ps ax | grep nano

The result should look something like this:

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

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:

sudo kill 14427

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

[jmill00]

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)

[jmill00]

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

[nothingspecial]

Did you try

 sudo kill 2169