- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Meanwhile on Linux: /boot successfully deleted
I once deleted /dev/null Do not recommend. You’d be surprised how much of the system needs it.
I once deleted /dev/urandom. I didn’t want uncertainty in my life.
Well, I was on for a surprise.
well, i guess your pc got into a pretty certain state of being, at least for that evening, so technically it worked:)
Process explorer, threads and handles tool, search the file name.
Kill the process or at least you know who now.
“Hey Microsoft, i want to safely remove this hard drive so i don’t corrupt my data”
“Nope, it’s being used by another program”
“I shut down every program, nothing is open, please eject my Hard drive”
“Nope, It’s being used by another program”
**Proceed to just yank the cord out of the computer and flick off the screen.
Well duh, Microsoft respects privacy
“Hey can I rent this apartment?”
“Let me check… Seems like it’s already occupied”
“Omg who is occupying it?”
“Let me print out their name and contact details for you”
Ah yes, great analogy. My computer with the operating system I installed and the files I own and want to modify certainly is the same as going to some strangers apartment and trying to buy it.
We don’t want to invade the privacy of… the software… right?
If you can’t see which program is using the file, that means it’s a different user than yours. Your computer doesn’t know more than the users it’s been set up to have.
You are so, SO wrong.
You’re so wrong that I have neither the time, patience, nor crayons needed to fully explain it to you.
Gotta love both replies saying this and not actually stating what’s wrong with what I said?
I’ll just sigh and move on, not worth getting stressed out over a dumb reply online
Gotta love both replies saying this and not actually stating what’s wrong with what I said?
That only applies in this situation if the requestor is also the owner of the building, as in the OP it is assumed the requestor owns the computer.
(On a multi-user system it is unlikely running Windows.)
If you’ve ever worked at a company, you probably were running Windows while simultaneously not owning your computer.
Is that even typical? At work we have like one Windows computer per person. But everyone has like 8 computers at home.
The computer is assigned to the person but it’s still owned and managed by the company.
O.o Why is your assumption that a multi user system isn’t running windows?
Bad analogy.
This would be more like the property management having a record of what apartments are rented, and having a second list of who is renting apartments (but not which one), and the landlord wanting to know who is renting apartment 420 so they can draw up eviction papers.
The user probably wasn’t running as admin (elevated) while deleting the file, so as far as the system knows, he may not be allowed to know which process is accessing the file.
your printer works?!
Actually on windows 7 I found out how to get which process is locking one file.
You open the resources manager (task manager has a link to it)
Inside you can see how much each process uses on cpu, network and stuff.
And there is a tab where all used files for each process is listed. You can search for specific files.
Yeah there’s a Microsoft sysinternals utility where you can drag a file into to fetch that info for you.
Makes zero sense there isn’t a >Details in the error notification that tells you the damned process in Windows.
Right? I get that it’s “alarming” to users to see weird stuff, but just hide it under a little expandable thing.
Not only that, but you can actually search all active processes to see which handles they keep references to. Just search the name of your file and it will show you the processes which use it
Reason 3756 why Windows is slopware
Same thing whenever I try to unplug a USB, Win10, on my desktop. There have been times where I plugged in one, opened a file, closed it within seconds, did the safely remove thing, and then I get the whole quick song and dance about some program still using it because of how sluggish it is to actually end what’s using it in the background.
Also, my phone’s keyboard software was bugging out and replaced “song” with “incest” for no discernable and wanted to replace the next word “and” with “rape incest”. Not related, but fuck Gboard and that weird glitch where it’ll replace words with random shit for no reason.
Doesn’t gboard try to promote words you’ve used more prior more often than ones you’ve used less…?
Yeah, dude really needs to atop looking up hentai, or at least start reading more wholesome ones.
Or get FUTO keyboard and disable autosuggest
There are good keyboard apps on F-Droid…
I have yet to find one that can properly do Chinese and/or Japanese and I’m too dumb to make one. That’s the only thing holding me back.
OK, WTAF on those word replacements. I’d be freaking out about malware.
That’s what happens when they train it on bad porn sites.
I cannot remember what it’s done in the past, but I’ve definitely had much more tame occurrences of this. Same with holding the delete key and having the thing think that the first letter of a word doesn’t exist from time to time.
Probably a couple of minor bugs that g••gle doesn’t care to fix.
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.
The bugs and horribly slow hardware that caused the locks in NT/XP have slowly disappeared, by win 10, I rarely had any files I couldn’t delete if I, worst case, made explorer reload. It used to happent o be every other day in the late 90s
The big file lock issue for me is when it is the file browser locking the file in order to give you a summary of it in the side bar, so you can’t edit it, you can’t rename it
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.
I feel like it’s a testing ground for new features for them, but not sure why some aren’t yet integrated. Best guess: the PowerToys team has less red tape and checks to go through than the Windows team to allow for faster iteration, but that means that integrating the features wouldn’t be just the click of a button since they’d have to adapt it to fit the Windows style. But this is just a wild guess.
I think you’re right on the money. There seems to be a component of enticing power users to stick with Windows as well. The app is still “in beta” despite the first release being in 1996 (!). I had to look that up, because I’d only heard about it in the early windows 10 days.
The first version of PowerToys was released for Windows 95 on 17 November, 1996 as a download on Microsoft’s FTP server at the time.
Well wadaya knows?
I like that it wasn’t a proper installed thing, just a bunch of executables in a zip file.
Because they want to include things with ads now - i.e. the ad-supported Outlook in the place of Mail.
not including PowerToys inside basic package is a fucking choice. Win11 is literally unusable without it in many aspects.
Sysinternals is also a great tool. Not as vital for the average user though.
gotta check it out. thanks for the tip
I suspect it’s in line with big tech policies to coddle end users instead of educating or trusting them. I assert (particularly since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007) that learned helplessness is built into the game plan.
100%! Like with major setups and upgrades now just being throbbing circles and a pulsing blue light with the creepy “We’re doing stuff on your behalf behind this screen.” messaging.
I say computers (and the Internet) are for anybody, but not everybody. Learning to use a tool will always be a requirement of useful tools.
There used to be a time when most people using a computer implicitly understood how files and folders worked, for instance. But now even such a simple abstraction is considered advanced esoteric lost arcana.
I’m deeply saddened by how the tech industry has deliberately pushed understanding backwards so hard in order to foster more obedient consumers.
It’s actually wild to see how many people who were at the very least, young adults during the computer boom of the late 80’s/early 90’s, can’t handle anything without a touch screen and don’t comprehend email, in 2025.
They sold us ignorance and dependency, and called it “the future.”
My dad used to say Apple is evil exactly because of that - they make stuff for people who want fancy shit but have little to no interest in actual tech.
I would argue windows 11 is pretty much unusable regardless
It works you just have to launch outlook 3 times for it to take.
LTSC is probably usable but if the base is so broken - i wonder if LTSC is still as good as Win10 LTSC.
Why would they not include these into base kit Windows is beyond me.
Some of them felt a bit buggy when I last time used Windows, maybe they aren’t fully ready to ship (like Samsung’s Good Lock apps?). And most features didn’t do quite what I imagined it to do, but that’s probably a “me problem”.
That’s a fair point, but, let’s be honest, the built in Windows features often have the same issues
Not recently copilot and AI implementation has made the OS beyond shitty recently and a lot of broken shit. That’s why I need to move to Linux they’re basically sinking their ship with broken AI code.
The telemetry is overbearing too lately.
Bill Gates secret hotline.
probably.
Mac does the same thing (as others have said) and you can at least
sudo lsofand find it, but somehow filesystem access now is worse than Windows 95 era Excel spreadsheet file handles that never worked.Here’s what an operating system is peeps: Something that handles files and programs that live on top of it. That’s it.
How is it none of them can’t do their basic function anymore?
Files, hardware / peripherals and programs. The distinction can get a bit blurry what with drivers and the fact that Linux exposes most of the hardware via the filesystem.
Same command works on Linux. Its a real saver sometimes.
You can also specify a path.
“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.Good to know, and helps me understand code dealing with filesystems a little better. I’m curious how the kernel keeps track of it all, just a counter maybe?
On Linux/Unix you don’t delete the file, you just delete it’s name, which is merely a link to the actual file.
Is that different on other systems?
I don’t know how NTFS does it, but on FAT filesystems the directory table contains the filename along with all the other file metadata (access rights, creation date, size, etc). Only the list of sectors containing the actual data is separate. That means that you can’t have two filenames for the same file on FAT filesystems.
If you want to learn more about this, the data structure UNIX filesystems use, and FAT filesystems lack is called inode.
This is honestly one of my favorite features of the linux filesystem. As a dev it makes things like replacing and hot-reloading plugins way easier.
It turns out you can kind of get the same functionality on Windows if you rename the open file and place the new one with the original name, but it’s a bit of a hack.
It turns out you can kind of get the same functionality on Windows if you rename the open file and place the new one with the original name, but it’s a bit of a hack.
Only if you don’t have OneDrive working. In that case, you have to wait for it to sync or it won’t go through.
Anytime I have an issue at work where I can’t change or delete a file, it’s a 50/50 split between Excel and OneDrive being the cause
Windows won’t let you rename a file that’s being used either.
Maybe it’s only possible in certain cases, but I can tell you for certain it’s possible with running exe’s and loaded dll’s. I have a CMake step on Windows that does this rename hack so my builds don’t fail if I still have the app running.
That’s actually a thing, but I’m not entirely sure in which cases. Probably only for services and not apps, but I’ve done that myself where deleting a file was impossible, but renaming it and deleting it worked.
Yeah, super annoying. In Linux you can rename or move it and the app using it doesn’t care.
Although having the option of listing the app using a file so I can kill the app would also be really nice to have. I’m sure Linux has something for that too, but I don’t know what it is.
You can use PowerToys on windows to see what app is using a particular file
I’m sure Linux has something for that too, but I don’t know what it is
fuser
I can’t remember the other program that’ll do it.
But there’s another one that’ll list all the processes using a file.
Tip of my tongue fuck.
lsof | grep <filename>
That’s the one
Same on Mac except it’s an external drive that some mystery program is using.
same with my kobo. It VERY rarely ejects it. It will just say “unable to eject. force eject?”
omg
Me: I’ve closed the program, now please delete the file
Windows: ok, give me half an hour, it’s not easy to delete 500 MB
Oh you think because you closed the program it’s released the file? Think again chump!
Hey Linux, sudo rm -rf /
sigh I’m surrounded by idiots.
“Sure thing boss” you fucking moron.
I did that once on my Macbook Air a while ago by mistake. The system’s completely fucked and I had to reinstall it.
Here’s an incredibly animated chart of how poorly I’m doing. Note that I seem to throttle the operation every 5 seconds or so.
Explanation? No, no. Haha. No. We don’t do anything like that.
… And the file is back open somehow. Only now the program throws an error when Windows launches, yet still leeches resources.
Some Windows apps do handle it properly. For example, if you have an archive open in 7-zip and try to delete it, Windows Explorer should correctly tell you that it’s open in 7-Zip. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way for all apps.
Shout out to my MVP Notepad++ telling the file has been deleted by another process and letting me decide if I want to keep it open anyway. Fantastic feature. I literally could not do my job without its ability to leave log files alone so they can be written to while I’m still browsing them.
Different user
Windows doesn’t even tell you if Explorer itself has a folder open… how the hell does 7-Zip do it?
