startxwin: cannot unlink

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Sun Feb 22 20:24:00 GMT 2004


On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Elvin Peterson wrote:

> --- Chris Green <chris<at>areti<dot>co<dot>uk> wrote:

Elvin,

Please configure your mail client to not quote raw e-mail addresses in
replies -- they're just so much fodder for spambots.

> > On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 08:26:13PM -0800, Elvin Peterson wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > $ ./startxwin.sh
> > > rm: cannot unlink `/tmp/.X11-unix/X0': Permission denied
> > > rm: cannot remove directory `/tmp/.X11-unix': Directory not empty
> > >
> > > Attempt to remove the file using explorer fails with "file in use
> > > error".  How do I remove this directory?  Any help is appreciated.
> > >
> > > I have attached the output from cygcheck -svr to this mail.
> > > Thanks.
> >
> > I had this problem a few weeks ago too, in the end I think I managed
> > to get rid of it from the windows command line.  However I couldn't
> > make any sense of the errors about "file in use" and so on either.
>
> Thanks for the reply.  I remember having the same problem when I tried
> to uninstall WinZip.  After a lot of tries, one day the file was just
> gone.  Seems like a stupid way to deal with things.

Terminating the process that holds a handle to the file will release that
handle.  Rebooting usually has that effect too (unless the process is an
automatically started service that reacquires the handle).

> Is there an equivalent to the Linux 'fuser' command for cygwin?  That
> would show what process was accessing it.
>
> Thanks.

Not in Cygwin per se, but there's a "handle" utility from
<http://www.sysinternals.com/> that will do what you want.  Keep in mind
that "handle" is a pure Windows program, and won't understand POSIX paths,
so you'll need to convert them using "cygpath", e.g.,

handle `cygpath -w /tmp/.X11-unix/X0`

HTH,
	Igor
-- 
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