Gateway unresponsive | Friends of the Crustacean 🦞🤝 | Page 1

floral apex Feb 21, 2026, 5:40 PM

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I've set up Openclaw and it's stopped working. I've ran : rm ~/.openclaw/gateway.pid and it keeps prompting no such file or directory

oblique totemBOT Feb 21, 2026, 5:41 PM

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graceful kestrelBOT Feb 21, 2026, 5:42 PM

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rm: ... No such file or directory just means ~/.openclaw/gateway.pid doesn’t exist on your machine (so there’s no stale PID file to delete). OpenClaw doesn’t rely on that file in many setups anymore, so deleting it usually won’t fix “gateway unresponsive”.

The fastest way to debug is to use the built-in status/log commands. On the machine running the Gateway, please run and paste the output of:

openclaw --version
openclaw gateway status
openclaw status --all
openclaw logs --follow

If you just want to try the “safe restart” first:

openclaw gateway restart

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And if it still won’t come back:

openclaw doctor
openclaw channels status --probe

Docs for this exact ladder:

Also tell me what “stopped working” means in your case (no replies in Discord? dashboard can’t connect? CLI says RPC probe failed?), because the next step depends on that.

floral apex Feb 21, 2026, 6:01 PM

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When I run openclaw --version it prompts error: unknown option -version

graceful kestrelBOT Feb 21, 2026, 6:04 PM

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That error message (unknown option -version) is what you get when the CLI receives a single-dash flag (-version), not the double-dash one.

Can you try these and paste the output?

openclaw --version
openclaw -V
openclaw status

If all of those fail / look weird, it usually means you’re not running the OpenClaw binary you think you are. Then please also paste:

which openclaw
openclaw --help | head -40

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