Description
Turns out that the default catalina.sh stop action is a weird in how it handles a missing PID file:
if [ ! -z "$CATALINA_PID" ]; then if [ -f "$CATALINA_PID" ]; then ... else echo "\$CATALINA_PID was set but the specified file does not exist. Is Tomcat running? Stop aborted." exit 1 fi fi
This, effectively, means that one can't stop an already stopped service cleanly.