fuser

I don’t know how many times I’ve searched the web for a win32 version of fuser. It is a great utility used in Unix/Linux for figuring out what process(es) have a file open (among other stuff).

Many would ask, “why not use handle.exe from SysInternals?”

While being a truly excellent utility (as all of SysInternals stuff is), it falls short — at least for me — for a couple of reasons:

1) It does filename pattern matching. I need it to do exact file matches with partial input. For example, when I’m in the C:\TMP directory, and I’m checking on a file named ‘out.dat’, I want it to see if the file C:\TMP\OUT.DAT is being used without having to type the full path in. I think even if you type in the full path for handle.exe, it will still do pattern matching.

2) Handle.exe seems to always exit 0. For scripting purposes, I need it to exit 1 if the file is not being used, but 0 if it is. This is very useful in scripts.

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