#windows #utility #process #file-locks

app win-locksmith

A Windows utility to find processes locking your files

1 unstable release

new 0.1.0 Mar 27, 2025

#363 in Development tools

MIT license

28KB
609 lines

Locksmith 🔒

A Windows utility to find out which processes are locking your files.

Ever wondered why you can't delete or modify a file? Locksmith will help you identify the processes that are holding onto your files.

Features

  • Find processes that have open handles to a specific file
  • Find processes that have loaded a specific DLL/module
  • Fast and lightweight command-line interface

Installation

cargo install win-locksmith

Usage

Basic usage:

locksmith <file_path>

Examples

Finding processes locking a file:

> locksmith "C:\Users\username\Desktop\important.txt"
Found 2 locker(s):

pid: 1234
name: notepad.exe
path: C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe

pid: 5678
name: explorer.exe
path: C:\Windows\explorer.exe

Building from Source

On Windows:

git clone https://github.com/wangfu91/locksmith
cd locksmith
cargo build --release

License

  • MIT license

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

Attribution

This project is a Rust port of the PowerToys's FileLockSmith module. The original implementation is in C++ and can be found here: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/tree/main/src/modules/FileLocksmith.

Dependencies

~125MB
~2M SLoC