Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...

[thoutam]

This is the message I'm stuck up with could anyone help me understand what is this?
Very thanks in advance

[glennzo]

Typicaly, that goes away in 60-90 seconds. In your case does this just keep happening endlessly? What does ps aux | grep yum show?

[nmset]

I'm not on Fedora but the error mesage seems quite clear. Some running application has locked the RPM database and yum can't start. It's probably another yum process. Try to find the process identifier and kill that process :

ps -e | grep yum
kill -SIGKILL <pid>

If it's not another yum process, it may be hard to find out, just reboot if it's not a 24/7 server.

[thoutam]

Typicaly, that goes away in 60-90 seconds. In your case does this just keep happening endlessly? What does ps aux | grep yum show?

Hey thanks for your response, but what does yum mean? I've no idea about what it is?

[glennzo]

Yum is the tool to update the system, along with PackageKit. Yum is typically used from the command line. You see the message you are seeing quite often when you try to use yum to install something. For example,

yum install somepackage
Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...

The message tends to repeat until the lock is released and then yum proceeds as expected. If you don't want to wait you can kill the process and then issue the yum install command.

[devils casper]

It looks like yum update package is running in the background.
Execute this in Terminal :

su -
service yum-updatesd stop
yum update

[velikij]

A bit more detail -

yum is an update manager for RedHat, Fedora, and other distibutions that use .rpm packages. The original version was written for Yellowdog Linux, so YUM originally stood for "Yellowdog Update Manager". The lock is a file or bit or byte set when a program is started to manage something, to keep another program from accessing the same resource (in this case packages).

The simplest way to solve this problem is to reboot, as locks will generally be unset after a boot - as someone else mentioned, this might not be a good way if the system is a server that other people or computers are depending on, but for a personal system that's generally ok.

[glennzo]

No need to reboot as far as I'm concerned. Stop the process that is holding the lock and move on.

[kurtdriver]

Hey thanks for your response, but what does yum mean? I've no idea about what it is?

How do you get this error message? As far as I know of, it only comes when you are running yum.
To find the other process type,

[you@Yourbox ~]$ps aux | grep yum

This should give you something like this,

username 30122 16.3 0.7 283544 14452 pts/0 R+ 17:55 0:00 /usr/bin/python/usr/bin/yum update
root 30124 0.0 0.0 103244 840 pts/9 S+ 17:55 0:00 grep yum

Here we see two processes running from the Yum program. In your situation there are probably three. The first will be the oldest, probably the one that's holding the yum lock. The most recent is your search with ps aux...
Find the "other program"
and send it to meet it's maker

The first set of numbers in each process is the Process Identification Number or PID.
Kill the PID
[you@Yourbox ~]$su -c "kill -9 PID".
You'll be asked for the root password (only root can kill root's processes), and then the kill program will run.
Please let us know if this works, it should be immediate.
You should not need to reboot Linux very often, certainly not for this small problem. Kurt

[devils casper]

There is no need to kill any process. As I mentioned ealier, first of all, stop yum-updatesd services. It will sort out problem.