ShowWhatProcessLocksFile

Designing and updating operating systems is an incredibly complex task and oftentimes, certain features demanded by the user-base may take a long amount of time before being implemented, which is where the open-source community takes it upon itself to provide optional solutions to enhance your productivity and fix issues with ease.

One example is ShowWhatProcessLocksFile, a simple yet efficient application that lets users know what programs are currently using a particular file or folder and terminate them on the spot in order to make modifications to the item in question.

Double-clicking the installation package instantly adds the program’s dedicated entry to Windows’ original context menu, which brings up a minimalist interface listing the apps preventing you from deleting, renaming, or moving various files from your local or external storage drives, thus giving you a clearer picture regarding the importance of the item to other running services before making any changes that could break the functionality of certain pieces of software.

When selecting a folder for the scanning operation, the utility not only displays its location that may come in handy for screenshots used in future references to determine behavioral patterns of newly installed programs, but also shows the detected processes’ IDs for easier searching in the services tab of the Task Manager during troubleshooting sessions.

Expanding any of the listed apps showcases the very files they require for successfully running in the background, along with their exact location for a clearer overview of the situation at hand. For those times when having to safely eject USB flash drives to avoid data loss, right-clicking on a process locking a particular file allows you to quickly terminate them without relying on the Task Manager in a pinch.

If you work with removable storage devices on the daily, and you have a habit of safely disconnecting them from Windows’ system tray menu before doing so physically, then ShowWhatProcessLocksFile can be of great use given its integration with the native context menu for those with mouse-focused workflows along with its lightweight memory footprint.