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I hate windows with a burning passion, but if you must use it then you should install Powertoys. Among the many useful utilities is file locksmith which will not only tell you what program is holding onto a file but also allows you to close it.

Edit: Also the "Awake" feature will keep your computer from falling asleep. Pair this with Caffeine.exe from Zhorn software (free download) and it will keep you green on MS Teams. One of the other useful features is the text extractor, which will capture any written text on your screen and copy it to your clipboard.

Kind of like dealing with your tax return

"You need to pay taxes"

"How much do I owe?"

"You need to figure that out but I already know the answer"

"Then tell me the answer and we can stop wasting time"

"No you have to guess"

"OK, I guess $100"

Two months later ... "You guessed wrong, the answer is $102"

I used to teach Microsoft Access:

"Scan Database For Errors" returned 1 of 2 messages:

"No Errors Found"

"Errors Found"

Good luck!

- Delete Thumbs.db
- I can't
- Rename Thumbs.db to asdf
- Done
- Delete asdf
- Done

dafuk.jpg

Idk if its a toxic trait to give solutions even though no help was asked for, but I always used Sysinternals Process Explorer to find the culprit. You just search for the file that "is open" by another program, and voila, you can see what you need to kill in order to delete said file.
I haven't had this problem on linux though.

Me: Hey Linux can you ________ ?

Linux: OK, I trust that you know what you're doing. It's on you if it breaks something.

That's how a computer should work.

It's especially fun in corporate IT.

"What do you mean user: [me] already has it open? I've never been in this folder in life, and I just rebooted!"

Or when it says it's open by a former employee with a disabled account.

If it's on a network share, you also can't rely on the normal tricks with process monitor and the like to look for locks locally.

It's one thing I'll praise about using office documents with OneDrive and (Azure based) Sharepoint in a well configured corporate setting: Microsoft finally caught up to Google Doc's collaboration functionality, and it handles "merge conflicts" fairly well for other file types (add the machine name as a suffix to the file name, keep both copies, and give a big warning message).

Sometimes if it was the last folder you had open the thumbnail file is still locked by explorer. Open a different folder with stuff in it then try deleting it again.

Or

• "oh I know which software is blocking it"
• Can you close it?
• "Nah, I ain't a snitch, go do it yourself"

Had this exact same problem a few nights ago! I used BCUninstaller to remove msys2 and couldn't delete the empty directory tree because some mystery program was supposedly using the empty folders.

I have to check and see if I can delete it now that I remember to do it.

In these situations, I use Unlocked to delete, move, rename, etc.