whoholds

Find which process is locking your file or hogging your port

Screenshot of whoholds

You know that moment โ€” โ€œThe process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.โ€ Which process? Windows wonโ€™t tell you. handle.exe requires a separate download and admin rights. whoholds myapp.dll just tells you.

Works for ports too: whoholds :8080 shows whatโ€™s binding it. Pipe the PIDs to kill them: whoholds myfile --pid-only | xargs kill. Cross-platform โ€” wraps lsof on Linux/macOS. Ships as a single native AOT binary, no .NET runtime needed.

Built because the โ€œfile is lockedโ€ error is one of the most common and frustrating developer experiences on Windows, and the existing answer (โ€œgo download Sysinternals handle.exe and run it as adminโ€) is absurd for something the OS already knows. Part of Winix, a suite of cross-platform CLI tools for the gaps between Windows and *nix.

Copilot says: AI-generated

Discover which sneaky process is locking your file or hogging your port in a snap, making troubleshooting a breeze and freeing your resources faster than you can say whoholds!

Key features:

  • ๐Ÿ•ต๏ธโ€โ™‚๏ธ Identify file locks and port bindings instantly
  • ๐ŸŒ Cross-platform support for seamless use on Windows, Linux, and macOS
  • โšก Native binaries with no runtime dependencies for lightning-fast performance
  • ๐ŸŽจ Human-friendly output with color and clear error messages

This summary was generated by GitHub Copilot based on the project README.