Try the kill or killall commands from the command line too. Simply right-click on the offending process and close if you have the permissions to do so. You can even try looking through the Task Manager application if you’re using a graphical desktop environment that supports this feature. Keep in mind that having read and write access for an application to open this file means by extension that said program must have root privileges, so you’ll need root privileges to close down the program.

Should you have it opened up somewhere, then you can just close down the application. Try using sudo lsof /var/lib/dpkg/lock to see if any other processes are running that have it open. If this still didn’t work, then you might have to check that you don’t have some other program trying to access the file while you’re running your update. Those working with pure Debian, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint and other similar desktop/laptop-oriented won’t have to worry about this, but it can be worth another try. Those who are using curl, wget or another command that downloads a file discretely might also have to preface that command with sudo should they be working from Raspbian since this takes the place of apt-get in some cases. Method 2: Removing the /var/lib/dpkg/lock File # Otherwise, though, the problem is already completely dealt with and you don’t need to do anything else. Keep in mind that this command will update and then upgrade all of your packages, so it might prompt you to approve it and it might take a while to run. If it does, then your problem is already fixed and it was merely because you weren’t giving the second process sufficient permissions to access the file. Try instead running sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get upgrade to see if that makes any difference. If you were to run sudo apt-get update & apt-get upgrade, then you might get this error since the second process doesn’t have the right authority to access the /var/lib/dpkg/lock file.

Method 1: Making Sure sudo Can Access Every Part of the Command # You can usually ignore anything asking you whether or not you’re root and go straight to the heart of the problem, which is related to two processes attempting to access a locked file at the same time.

Dpkg command