After I attempted to close a table in an Apache OpenOffice Base database, the database application stopped responding. The table remained open, but I couldn't do anything in it, open any other table, etc. So I forced the program to quit using the Activity Monitor. When I tried to reopen OpenOffice after its abnormal termination, I saw the message below:
OpenOffice 4.1.1
Either another instance of OpenOffice is accessing your personal settings or
your personal settings are locked.
Simultaneous access can lead to inconsistencies in your personal settings.
Before continuing, you should make sure user 'jasmith1' closes OpenOffice
on host 'gs371.example.com'.
Do you really want to continue?
I selected "No" and looked in the OpenOffice user profile for my account for
a .lock file - you need to use the -a option for the
ls command to see "dot something" files that would otherwise be
hidden.
$ ls -al ~/Library/Application\ Support/OpenOffice/4 total 8 drwxr-xr-x 4 jasmith1 NDC\Domain Users 136 Jan 8 16:28 . drwxr-xr-x 3 jasmith1 NDC\Domain Users 102 May 18 2015 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 jasmith1 NDC\Domain Users 143 Jan 8 16:28 .lock drwxr-xr-x 18 jasmith1 NDC\Domain Users 612 Jan 8 20:42 user $
Since OpenOffice wasn't closed normally, the .lock file remained. After I deleted the .lock file, I was able to open OpenOffice without the message reappearing.
$ rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/OpenOffice/4/.lock $
When the program reopened I saw an OpenOffice Document Recovery window allowing me to recover the database I had been working on before I had to terminate the Base application.
I clicked on the Start Recovery button and then was informed that the recovery of the database was successful.
When I clicked on Next I was able to access the database again.
