Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

WinClient

Kollen Glynn's Blog
How to find out which process is locking a DLL
I thought this might be useful to people running XP or later.  Every so often I need to know what process has locked a DLL because a delete or similar operation failed.  In such cases I always turn to tasklist.exe, the command line version of the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc).  It's not well known but it can be incredibly handy, especially the module switch.  Just type: tasklist /m thelocked.dll and it will return all processes that have loaded that DLL!
Posted: Thursday, July 08, 2004 8:17 PM by winclient

Comments

My Blog said:

# July 9, 2004 1:40 AM

Andrey Skvortsov said:

Thanks,I've used "psexplorer" from sysinternals for the same purpose but this means is more convenient.
# July 9, 2004 12:42 AM

Ed's Blog said:

# July 9, 2004 8:21 AM

Justin Lovell's Blog said:

# July 9, 2004 8:52 AM

joe said:

What OS version? I'm running 2000 Professional (not my choice, standard work image) and it doesn't work.

joe
# July 9, 2004 7:57 AM

Ernst Kuschke said:

Only available on XP / 2003 ;)
# July 9, 2004 8:53 AM

Kollen Glynn said:

I updated the post to indicate XP or later.
# July 9, 2004 9:03 AM

joseph said:

only works on XP/2003
not on 2000
# July 9, 2004 9:16 AM

BizTalk Integration Experiences said:

Find the process that is locking a dll

# April 4, 2008 3:08 PM
Anonymous comments are disabled
Page view tracker