I'm looking for a way to delete a file which is locked by another process using C#. I suspect the method must be able to find which process is locking the file (perhaps by tracking the handles, although I'm not sure how to do this in C#) then close that process before being able to complete the file delete using File.Delete(). ...
I need to copy hundreds of gigs of random files around on my computer and am pretty leery of using the vanilla file copy built into Windows. I don't want it to hang on a "Are you sure?", "Are you really sure?", "Even zip files?", "Surely not read-only files too!" loop as soon as I step away. I don't want it to work for hours and then s...
Generally, how bad of a performance hit is storing a file in a database (specifically mssql) as opposed to the file system? I can't come up with a reason outside of application portability that I would want to store my files as varbinaries in SQL Server. ...
One of my favourite tools for linux is lsof - a real swiss army knife! Today I found myself wondering which programs on a WinXP system had a specific file open. Is there any equivalent utility to lsof? Additionally, the file in question was over a network share so I'm not sure if that complicates matters. ...
I'd like to be able to track file read/writes of specific program invocations. No information about the actual transactions is required, just the file names involved. Is there a cross platform solution to this? What are various platform specific methods? On linux I know there's strace/ptrace (if there are faster methods that'd be goo...
How do I get perl to read the contents of a given directory into an array? Backticks can do it, but I know there is some method using 'scandir' or a similar term? ...
I have to develop an application which parses a log file and sends specific data to a server. It has to run on both Linux and Windows. The problem appears when I want to test the log rolling system (which appends .1 to the name of the creates a new one with the same name). On Windows (haven't tested yet on Linux) I can't rename a file ...
I recently ran out of disk space on a drive on a FreeBSD server. I truncated the file that was causing problems but I'm not seeing the change reflected when running df. When I run du -d0 on the partition it shows the correct value. Is there any way to force this information to be updated? What is causing the output here to be differe...
We have several .NET applications that monitor a directory for new files, using FileSystemWatcher. The files are copied from another location, uploaded via FTP, etc. When they come in, the files are processed in one way or another. However, one problem that I have never seen a satisfactory answer for is: for large files, how does one kno...
I'll admit that I don't know the inner workings of the unix operating system, so I was hoping someone could shed some light on this topic. Why is the Unix file system better than the windows file system? Would grep work just as well on Windows, or is there something fundamentally different that makes it more powerful on a Unix box? e....
Imagine we have a program trying to write to a particular file, but failing. On the Windows platform, what are the possible things which might be causing the file to be un-writable, and what steps could be suggested to an end user/administrator to fix it. Please include steps which might require administrator permissions (obviously u...
Anybody know of a way to copy a file from path A to path B and suppressing the Windows file system cache? Typical use is copying a large file from a USB drive, or server to your local machine. Windows seems to swap everything out if the file is really big, e.g. 2GiB. Prefer example in C#, but I'm guessing this would be a Win32 call of so...
Hi, If I write a file to disk on Windows XP, how can I get the physical sector (or sectors) that are used to store the file on disk? Thanks, Terry ...
Hi, When I defragment my XP machine I notice that there is a block of "Unmovable Files". Is there a file attribute I can use to make my own files unmovable? Just to clarify, I want a way to programmatically tell Windows that a file that I create should be unmovable. Is this possible, and if so, how can I do it? Thanks, Terry ...
Hi, Is there a way to guarantee that a file on Windows (using the NTFS file system) will use contiguous sectors on the hard disk? In other words, the first chunk of the file will be stored in a certain sector, the second chunk of the file will be stored in the next sector, and so on. I should add that I want to be able to create this f...
In Windows, is there an easy way to tell if a folder has a subfile that has changed? I verified, and the last modified date on the folder does not get updated when a subfile changes. Is there a registry entry I can set that will modify this behavior? If it matters, I am using an NTFS volume. I would ultimately like to have this abil...
Is there a way to access file system info via some type of Windows API? If not what other methods are available to a user mode developer? ...
Hi, I need to get some information that is contained in the MFT on a Windows machine, and I'm hoping that there is some super-secret API for getting this information. I need to be able to get to this information programmatically, and because of legal concerns I might not be able to use the tools provided by the company formally known as...
Does Java impose any extra restrictions of its own. Windows (upto Vista) does not allow names to include \ / < > ? * : I know HOW to validate names (a regular expression). I need to validate filenames entered by users. My application does not need to run on any other platform, though, of course, I would prefer to be platform indepen...
When i try to offline a disk in a zfs raidz pool (the raidz pool is not mirrored), zfs says that the disk cannot be taken offline because it has no valid mirror. Isn't one of the properties of raidz that it has a redundant disk (or even 2 disks in raidz2)...? ...