mysqld dead but subsys locked

I'm executing the following command in a shell script and I'm executing this on an RHEL-6 server and MySQL version 5.1.47- mysqld_safe --defaults-extra-file=/custom/path/of/my.cnf The path of my.cnf can be anything. (If I am not wrong, as a developer we cannot determine where mysql could be installed.) After the above command in the script, there are a few mysql commands to be executed. When the script executes the above command, the output console displays that the mysql service has successfully started. But when the control comes to the part where the mysql commands are to be executed, the following error message comes up- mysqld dead but subsys locked Any idea where I am going wrong? This is what my my.cnf contains- [mysqld] innodb_log_buffer_size=8M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 innodb_file_io_threads=4 max_binlog_size=20M max_allowed_packet=16M max_connections=500 log_bin=logFile.log binlog-do-db=test server-id=1 datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock user=mysql binlog-format=ROW log_warnings=1 # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0