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!
Comments
- Anonymous
July 08, 2004
Thanks,I've used "psexplorer" from sysinternals for the same purpose but this means is more convenient. - Anonymous
July 08, 2004
What OS version? I'm running 2000 Professional (not my choice, standard work image) and it doesn't work.
joe - Anonymous
July 09, 2004
Only available on XP / 2003 ;) - Anonymous
July 09, 2004
I updated the post to indicate XP or later. - Anonymous
July 09, 2004
only works on XP/2003
not on 2000 - Anonymous
April 04, 2008
Find the process that is locking a dll