Windows Developer Power Tools

23.13 Resolving Locking Problems with Unlocker

You’re diligently working away at your development or testing tasks, when all of a sudden you get an annoying dialog with an error along the lines of “Cannot delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program.” Unfortunately, you have no idea what process might have a lock on this particular object. You could fire up Process Explorer or Filemon (both discussed in Chapter 15), but neither of those quickly points out the offending culprit, so you’ll have to spend a few minutes trying to figure out which process has nabbed the file you need. (Or, more likely, closing apps and ending processes in a time-wasting game of elimination until you can delete the directory.)

Cedrick Collomb’s Unlocker can help you out of this jam. Unlocker installs itself in your System Tray and is available via a right-click context menu.

Unlocker at a Glance
Tool	Unlocker
Version covered	1.8.3
Home page	http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/175
Summary	Helps you quickly find which processes are locking files of interest, and kill those processes if needed
License type	Freeware
Online resources	FAQ
Related tools in this book	Process Explorer, Filemon

Getting Started

Unlocker runs on any 32-bit Windows version: 2000/XP/Server 2003.

Unlocker is available as an executable file download. Install it, and you’ll have a new icon ...