Apple - How do I force a "Waiting" file to upload to iCloud?

I was concerned I'd have to save these documents to my local filesystem, delete them from iCloud, and then perhaps save them to iCloud over again, but it turned out that simply re-opening the "Waiting" documents, making a trivial change to them (such as deleting a character and then adding it in again), and then saving the file caused them to be synced successfully.

In the terminal touch the file and it is fixed.

I ran into a similar problem but every time I tried to open the file, the hosting application (Keynote in this case) hung. I was able to killall -9 ubd to unwedge iCloud.