Finding what files a program has opened

[sedarious]

Is there any way to find out what files a currently running application has open? The reason is excel always wants to open some tiff file as soon as it opens and this is causing all kinds of adverse effects...

[Strike]

I know of a way to do it in Linux ..... :D

[jamessan]

Yup. lsof is your friend in linux. Don't think there's an equivalent for Windows, unless it's been ported with cygwin.

[stuka]

http://www.sysinternals.com
filemon
Description: This monitoring tool lets you see all file system activity in real-time. It works on all versions of WinNT/2K, Windows 9x/Me, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, and Linux.

-or-

handle
Description: This handy command-line utility will show you what files are open by which processes, and much more.

[bwkaz]

fuser also works in Linux, and is fairly widespread (it's part of the psmisc package, which also contains killall and pstree). lsof is a separate package that not all distros install. ;)

But try what other things have been posted for Windows.

[jamessan]

I didn't realize fuser could be used like that. I had just used it for fuser -k. Thanks for the info, bwkaz.

Stuka, good suggestion about sysinternals. I had forgot about them, but their junction utility has come in handy a few times.

[bwkaz]

Heh. I didn't have a clue what fuser -k did. :P

I thought the only usage of it was like lsof... :redfaced: