Comments on: Ubuntu, Opening firefox, says is already running, close existing process

By: Bhaskar Chowdhury

Bhaskar Chowdhury — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:09:40 +0000

Hi guys,

I have faced the same problem on openSUSE11.1 and I found out the I mistakenly changed the permission of /home/somebody/.mozilla/firefox/profile folder. So I change back it the user running it and it start working

Thanks all the ppl for the insight into this problem.

By: Bhaskar Chowdhury

Bhaskar Chowdhury — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:01:46 +0000

Hi guys,

I have face the same problem in openSUSE11.1 and rectified it by changing the file/folder permission. Mistakenly I made to root:root to all the folder under /home/somebody/.mozilla/firefox/profile/ and it showed the mentioned problem.

So I changed back the permission to normal user and it start working. Thanks all of you for the wonderful insight about this problem.

Thanks
Bhaskar

By: venkat

venkat — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:33:49 +0000

thanks shah

rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/{profilefolder}/lock does the trick

By: Rob A

Rob A — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:41:16 +0000

pkill -9 firefox
sends “SIGKILL” rather than “SIGTERM” – SIGTERM is not supposed to be blockable, but sometimes a hung process can’t honor SIGTERM. SIGKILL always works. “pkill” is easier, since it does the “ps aux |grep -i firefox” work for you.

killall will run “kill -15″ on multiple instances of the same process (SIGTERM, not SIGKILL), so is also useful where pkill isn’t, but not quite as powerful.

ps aux |grep firefox
sudo kill -9
is simply just a lot more to type. Cheers!

By: sue

sue — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:26:17 +0000

rm lock and .parentlock really help.
Thanks.

By: mitch

mitch — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 03:23:20 +0000

the sudokill command didn’t work for me, but running xkill in the command dialog box worked like a charm .. thanks josh!

By: Matias

Matias — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:28:26 +0000

Thanks, works fine !

By: shruti

shruti — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:38:17 +0000

hi,

i had the same problem. I used kill -9 ####. It did work for me thanks kae

By: shah

shah — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:09:25 +0000

Hi Josh, had trouble posting response (killall didn’t work) so did some more searching and found solution. Because firefox had not closed properly the previous profile lock file still existed and so I simply had to do the following:

“rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/{profile_folder}/lock”
and
“rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/{profile_folder}/.parentlock”

Hope that will be helpful to others encountering the same problem. Thanks.

By: josh

josh — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:05:10 +0000

shah:

A couple other things you can try is:

killall firefox-bin

One thing I found on the openSuse forums is
1. Press Alt F2 (run command dialog box)
2. Type “xkill” and press Enter/Return key
3. Position the skull icon over the window you want to close/kill and click on it with your left mouse button.

Hope one of those help?

Josh