How to get rid of a corrupt lock

Some pro commands (attach, enable, detach and disable) will potentially change the internal state of your system. Since those commands can run in parallel, we have a lock file mechanism to guarantee that only one of these commands can run at the same time. The lock follows this pattern:

PROCESS_PID:LOCK_HOLDER_NAME

Where:

PROCESS_PID: The PID of the process that is running the pro command LOCK_HOLDER_NAME: The name of the command that is using the lock (i.e. pro disable)

If the lock file doesn’t follow that pattern, we say that it is corrupted. That might happen if we have any type of disk failures in the system. Once we detect a corrupted lock file, any of the mentioned pro commands will generate the following output:

There is a corrupted lock file in the system. To continue, please remove it
from the system by running:

$ sudo rm /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/lock

You can follow the instructions presented on the output to get rid of the corrupted lock. After that, running the command should generate a correct lock file and continue as expected.