.maintenance file and plugin updates.

So for about 6-8 months now I’ve been having this problem. It’s not critical, but annoying and I can’t seem to find (a) how it started and (b) how it can be resolved.

How it started

So somehow when doing plugin updates, something must have changed because the update (no matter what the plugin) would fail. You would be left with a message like “updating plugin x (1/n)” and then nothing.

I searched around and found the .maintenance file was not being deleted. So I manually deleted it, refreshed the updates page and was back in business. However, if you’ve got 5 or 6 updates to do, you’ve basically go to do the following

1. Go to web root in window 1.
2. Go to updates page in window 2.
3. Start update for plugin 1.
4. Go to window 1.
5. Delete .maintenance file.
6. Go to window 2.
7. Hit refresh (plugin 1 now is updated and disappears from list).

Go back to step 3 and start it over again. Manually deleting the .maintenance file for each plugin that requires an update.

WordPress itself updates automatically without a hitch.

So…I don’t know how this started (everything was working really well before) and I don’t know how to fix it once and for all (e.g. is there a permission issue preventing the .maintenance file from being deleted – but not created?). I have searched on these forums but most issues seem to be helping people remove the .maintenance file if they get stuck.

Like I said, not critical, there’s a workaround (the manual delete), but I’d like to try and figure out why this happened and how to fix it.

Cheers,
Brhum