you have to find the lock file that got stuck (most likely from a previous session that died) and delete it. a simple ls -la on your work folder will reveal the lock file.
Cadence Virtuoso locks every cellview opened in "Edit mode". Also it locks the CDS.log file. The locks remain permanently if software crashes or user logs out without closing Virtuoso properly.
In order to remove locks you should use clsAdminTool utility. It opens simple shell so user can ran Unix-like commands. "Help" command provides help on all commands. The simplest usage of clsAdminTool to remove all the existing locks is as follows:
Close all Cadence tools.
Go to home directory (cd ~)
Start clsAdminTool
Execute command "are ." Remmember about space between "are" and "." (dot).
If you try to open an old file and Cadence says you can't edit the file, it is because this file has become "locked." This usually happens as a result of Cadence crashing while the file was open.
To unlock the file, you need to search for and remove (using the rm command) a file that ends in ".cdslck". You will often have to look through directories and subdirectories to find this file, but look in directories that have the same name as the cellview in question. For example if you are having trouble opening the schematic in cellview "Inverter" in library "myLib" then you would go to the folder myLib/Inverter/ and look for all files ending in ".cdslck".
As an alternative to manually searching through the directories you can use the command (from the directory where you start cadence):
find . -name "*.cdslck"
Before you run this command close all open shcematics and layouts. Then simply remove all files that appear.
To remove all cdslck files, you can use the command rm together with searching(from the directory where you start cadence):
Exactly right, you may face with the problem when you want to move the library from one version of cadence to another ver, which can be solved by finding the file and deleting it.