dpkg error dpkg frontend is locked by another process

Question

On trying to install Puppet server on a linux i encountered the above error. How do i resolve it?

Answer 1

First, find out the id of the process that is holding the lock file.

lsof /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend

The above command will give you the PID of the processes using the lock files. Use this PID to kill the process.

sudo kill -9 PID

Now you can remove the lock and reconfigure dpkg:

sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Hope this helps!