How do I unlock a SQLite database?

Question

sqlite> DELETE FROM mails WHERE (`id` = 71);
SQL error: database is locked

How do I unlock the database so this will work?

Answer 1

My lock was caused by the system crashing and not by a hanging process. To resolve this I simply renamed the file then copied it back to it's original name and location.

Using a linux shell that would be...

mv mydata.db temp.db
cp temp.db mydata.db