Luke Scammell's Personal Blog

Thanks to Wojtek Dmyszewicz on StackOverflow for saving me time and frustration when I ran into [ERROR] InnoDB: Unable to lock ./ibdata1, error while working with MariaDB at the command line.

The solution is to list all currently running MariaDB processes, which call themselves ‘mysql’ for compatibility with MySQL:

ps aux | grep mysql

This will output some results, such as this:

luke@hostname:~$ ps aux | grep mysql
mysql     1681  0.1 17.7 684476 88716 ?        Ssl  10:07   0:04 /usr/sbin/mysqld
luke      5294  0.0  0.1  14232   944 pts/0    S+   10:50   0:00 grep --color=auto mysql
luke@hostname:~$

This shows you the process ID for your running mysql processes, which you can then kill. In this case I would execute:

sudo kill 1681