First a warning: when you have found the process holding open a file, and you want to forcibly close the handle, read this post why you should not: Windows Confidential: Forcing Handles Closed.
In fact:
if you forcibly need to close a handle to salvage something, you should reboot shortly afterwards.
Back to the question at hand:
One thing that annoys me no end about Windows is the old “sharing violation” error. Often you can’t identify what’s holding it open. Usually it’s just an editor or explorer just pointing to a relevant directory but sometimes I’ve had to resort to rebooting my machine.
Any suggestions on how to find the culprit?
All of the below solutions require you to run with Administrative privileges.
On current Windows versions, if you run them without UAC elevation, they will miss a lot of processes. And still: under some secured environments you won’t see all processes anyway.
My preferred answer is not on the list:
Quit the application that holds the handle
All the tools that show you the handles will indicate which process holds the handle.
Often, you can just quit that process, do your job on the affected file, then relaunch that process.
When the process is Explorer, there is a neat little trick that works for Windows Vista and up:
For explorer, btw, hold ctrl-shift and right-click a blank area of the start menu, and you’ll get “Exit Explorer” – ps, not quite Jeff’s answer.. – Mark Sowul
Another answer I like is to use Handle, as it is both a command-line tool, and allows for wildcard searching: Read the rest of this entry »
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