"kicad is already running, Continue?" Mac OS X 10.11 kicad 4.0.1-stable release

Software
1

Hi,

I get following error each time if I start kicad on Mac OS X 10.11: kicad is already running, Continue?. The problem is that actually it is not running.

Atleast ps aux | grep kicad did not show anything before launching it.

Well this is little nuisance compared to this that now I cannot open my schematic anymore. It says:

Error

Schematic file '/Users/xxx/xxx.sch' is already open.

However I can open some older kicad projects that I have. Something happened to these particular project files. I might have hard rebooted mac while kicad was still open. Maybe there are somekind of lock files or something that are not cleaned up, because it worked nicely before.

2

Have you tried Utilities > Activity Monitor > Kill or force quit Kicad?

3

Funny thing is that it is not there, actually there is no kicad running. However for some reason it thinks there is.

4

At least the same issue is also documented by someone else, so it is not an isolated case: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.kicad.user/20452

5

I resolved the problem by using nightly version: http://downloads.kicad.org/osx/nightly/kicad-r6494.20160118-032857.dmg.
I just copied kicad to Applications and did not update kicad folder in Application Support.

6

This happens when KiCAD (or OSX) crashes and the lock files are still in place.

The fix is courtesy of IRC support: #kicad: < xzcvczx> the lock files are in ~/Library/Caches/kicad

IOW, run: rm ~/Library/Caches/kicad/*.lock
from a terminal to fix this.

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