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How to find out which process is locking a DLL

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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