- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
In case anyone is interested, there’s a powertoy called file locksmith that will show what’s using it and let you kill it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/file-locksmith
Powertoys seems to be the only thing keeping windows somewhat usable, I have no idea why they don’t include it in the build.
“Hey Linux, can you just delete this file please?”
“Sure thing bud, a program is using it, it’s ok, I will just unlink the inode anyway, the program can still access it until it closes the file”
Hmm. So are the blocks freed up for overwriting on file close, then?
Yes. On Linux/Unix you don’t delete the file, you just delete it’s name, which is merely a link to the actual file. That’s also the reason why the syscalls name is actually
unlinkand notdelete. As soon as there’s nothing pointing to a file anymore, it is deleted.As long as a process holds a file handle, there’s still a reference to said file, so it won’t be deleted. That saved me once, when I accidentally deleted a file I wanted to keep: As there still was some process keeping it alive, I could just go to
/proc/[process id]/fd/[file descriptor id]and copy it to a safe location.
Same on Mac except it’s an external drive that some mystery program is using.
back in the XP days, I used a software called “Unlocker” just for this problem. It probably still exists, I don’t know, because since Windows 7, the easiest way to find out what process locks a file is to open Resource Monitor (Start search: resmon) and on the CPU tab, using the “Associated handles” list, you can search for the file name and see the process in question (and kill it).
So yeah, Resource Monitor is a useful tool on Windows.
There’s a collection of free little utilities called Microsoft PowerToys, including the file unlocker thing. Why would they not include these into base kit Windows is beyond me.
not including PowerToys inside basic package is a fucking choice. Win11 is literally unusable without it in many aspects.
I would argue windows 11 is pretty much unusable regardless




