Eclipse: Workspace in use or cannot be created Error
- By Viral Patel on October 20, 2009
Lot of time when I am working in Eclipse, it get crashed due to some or the other reasons. Most of the time this is because I have opened a lot of applications that I am working on and this takes a bit of memory. So finally everything just get hanged and does not have enough RAM to work on. Thus, Eclipse just get hanged and what I do is to kill the eclipse process.
But next time when you try opening the workspace it gives you error “Workspace in use or cannot be created, choose a different one.”
This is because, Eclipse creates a .lock file in the workspace and make the workspace lock. This is to avoid opening the same workspace in different eclipse process.
But when Eclipse is crashed or you kill the process to free the memory, it does not delete the .lock file in workspace folder and thus you cannot open the workspace again with eclipse.
To avoid this problem, simply locate the .lock file in your workspace folder and delete it. Please do not delete the .lock file if eclipse is already opened.
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Ahh, thank you. Although I spotted my .lock file in the metadata folder (at the root of my workspace),
hi.when i am opening the eclipse IDE at that time it is giving me an error message -
” Workspace in use or cannot be created, choose a different one “.
when 1st time it gave me this msg i had opened a new workspace but each time i m opening IDE i have to create a new workspace.after my PC has been added to n/w it is not a;;owing me to delete any data that i had previously stored and previous workspace as well.So i made new workspace that is editable in which i had deleted the .lock file.then also it is giving me the same error.Please help meee……………….
Yes deleting .lock file resolved my issue. Thanks a lot for nice suggestion.
Wow.Worked like a charm. Had mistakenly killed an eclipse process from terminal while its open and it was not recoverable. Thanks for the suggestion
Thank-you for the hint.
Thank you .. this was useful. I thought I have sacrificed my workspace. but thanks to this article
Thanks. This worked for me.
Simply Great… I spent half day to fix this issue…
I knew what to do, but didn’t know why
You solved that for me … Thanks
Kudos! You fixed my problem.
Hi All,
Above information is usefull. However it did not help me in my case.
I gave full control permission to my workpsace folder and issue got resolved.
Details:
1. i was facing same error when i was opening my weblogic portal workshop on windows-7
2. after givining full control permission to my bea_home folder issue got fixed.
Thanks,
Ramu Patil
Fixing permissions worked for me!
Good tip. I’ve needed to remotely kill a particular Eclipse session that has this specific lock.
cd /.metadata
fuser -k .lock
Hi..The infm you provided was really useful…But when I searched my Workspace for .lock file I didnt find it..
So I went to System->Administration->System Monitor->Processes Tab->Killed the Eclipse and all the java processes running..
voilà —-It worked
Hello
Worked for me. After opening eclipse again , it comes back whenever I want to save
a modified file.
Is there a solution for this ?
thanks
If you cant find .lock in your folder try /.metadata folder.
thanks
thanks,it is so helpful for me.
Thanks a lot!!