Tomcat won't stop or restart

I had this error message having started up a second Tomcat server on a Linux server.

$CATALINA_PID was set but the specified file does not exist. Is Tomcat running? Stop aborted.

When starting up the 2nd Tomcat I had set CATALINA_PID as asked but my mistake was to set it to a directory (I assumed Tomcat would write a default file name in there with the pid).

The fix was simply to change my CATALINA_PID to add a file name to the end of it (I chose catalina.pid from the above examples). Next I went to the directory and did a simple:

touch catalina.pid

creating an empty file of the correct name. Then when I did my shutdown.sh I got the message back saying:

PID file is empty and has been ignored.
Tomcat stopped.

I didn't have the option to kill Tomcat as the JVM was in use so I was glad I found this.

It seems Tomcat was actually stopped. I started it and it started fine. Thanks all.

Recent I have met several times of stop abnormal. Although shutdown.sh provides some information, The situations are:

• result of the command ps -ef| grep java is Null.
• result of the command ps -ef| grep java is not null.

My opinion is just kill the process of Catalina and remove the pid file (In your situation is /opt/tomcat/work/catalina.pid.)

The result seems not so seriously to influence others.