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I tried to rm -rf a folder, and got "device or resource busy".

In Windows, I would have used LockHunter to resolve this. What's the linux equivalent? (Please give as answer a simple "unlock this" method, and not complete articles like this one. Although they're useful, I'm currently interested in just ASimpleMethodThatWorks™)

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2 Answers

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The tool you want is lsof, which stands for list open files.

It has a lot of options, so check the man page, but if you want to see all open files under a directory:

lsof +D /path

That will recurse through the filesystem under /path, so beware doing it on large directory trees.

Once you know which processes have files open, you can exit those apps, or kill them with the kill(1) command.

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I use fuser for this kind of thing. It will list which process is using a file or files within a mount.

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fuser helps only in the specific case when you want to unmount a filesystem. Here the problem is to find what's using a specific file. – Gilles Apr 13 '11 at 19:09
@Gilles: Also works for files. – BillThor Apr 14 '11 at 0:36
Sorry, wrong objection: fuser doesn't help here because the problem is to find all the open files in a directory tree. You can tell lsof to show all files and filter, or make it recurse; fuser has no such mode and needs to be invoked on every file. – Gilles Apr 14 '11 at 7:57
@Giles: fuser works will lists. Try fuser /var/log/*, if any logs are open it will tell which ones and who has it open. If a simple wildcard, won't work, find with or without xargs will do the job. – BillThor Apr 14 '11 at 17:23

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