I am having this error, since this morning when I switch on my computer and tried to launch Thunderbird: “Unable to load address book file abook.mab. It may be read-only, or locked by another application. Please try again later.” Moreover I lost all the emails addresses which were set up in Thunderbird, 25 addresses. I am not an Ubuntu specialist, just a simple basic user. I found a post almost equivalent here : Mozilla Thunderbird Error (38.5.1) I wanted to try the solutions but : - I don't want to use "touch" command, as I don't want to create a new address book, but recover my address book and the email addresses I already set up . - I couldn't find "abook.mab" or "abook.mab.bak" files on my computer, therefore I was not able to try the second option described by @Ramesh Chand. Thanks for any help JP S
find -name "*abook*" 2>/dev/null
returns nothing? I get./.thunderbird/l0w22ubs.default/abook.mab
find
finds thing you want to find. in this case the criteria for finding was a name, hence-name
then in between the quotes comes the name you're looking forabook
bracketted by two wildcards :*
which allow the search to broaden to anything before or after those sets of characters and lastly2>/dev/null
silences the errors because find whines alot while in the process of going through folders and files if any of them need admin priveleges to be read.)