restart rmate when stuck

sometimes rmate setup in a remote server may not work. Causes could be numerous: simply you left it open too long and the server somehow showed erraneous behavior, or you had to abruptly shutdown your ssh connection in a forceful manner.

When the rmate is stuck, it will simply not open a file that the user commanded to open with rmate.

One way to bypass this problem is to setup a different port for rmate and use that along with -p option. But it really is cumbersome to keep adding this option every time you want to open a file.

So here is a tutorial on how to restart rmate.

First identify the previous rmate process that is blocking the current user’s rmate access.

$ sudo netstat -tulpn | grep 52698

this will show the pid that rmate is running on. Please note that without sudo, you won’t be able to see the pid and instead it will be displayed with -.

Once you have identfied the pid, then kill it. (the following example assumes that the pid has been identified as 3345)

$ sudo kill -9 3345

Now, you probably should be able to use rmate fresh and new.