Who is holding my file open?

August 11, 2006 by Isaac

I cannot count how many times I have thrown my hands up in frustration as Windows keeps yelling at me about a being unable to delete a file because it is still open. Who is holding it open? Enter Process Explorer. For a sampling of its many cool features you can read this article or this article. Process Explorer can not only tell you which process is holding on to a file, but it can show you a process tree, run a Google search on a process name which you don't recognize, identify process executables which are compressed, check to see if an executable has been signed properly, and more.

For the Linux world there is something else you can use called "lsof." See here for a good article covering its use.

Happy process hunting!

Posted in Linux, Windows