/var/lib/dpkg/lock ?

[Barry Mathieu <barkatbarry@mindspring.com>]

I am a Debian newbie attempting to use cron for apt.

In the cron response mail message, I noticed the following
lines, in response to, "apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade":

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily
unavailable)

E: Unable to lock the administration directory, are you root?

The apt-get commands are placed in root's crontab.

Then, at the command line as root, I again issued the command,
"apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade"

and received the same lines, 

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily
unavailable)

E: Unable to lock the administration directory, are you root?


Am I supposed to delete this 'lock' file? Why is this occurring?

Looking forward to some suggestions,
Barry