One day I was curious to know what files are being opened on my system. For example, when I run Firefox, I know for sure that there are other associated files such as fonts, dat and jar files that are ran together with Firefox and it’s invisible. From what we see on desktop, it’s only Firefox being loaded. It is possible for a trojan to be injected into Firefox and you won’t even know or see that it’s being automatically loaded every time you run Firefox.
I found a very small, less than 40KB and useful tool that is able to display a list of all opened files on your system and I’d like to share with all of you.
OpenedFilesView is able to display the list of all opened files on your system. For each opened file, additional information is displayed: handle value, read/write/delete access, file position, the process that opened the file, and more… Optionally, you can also close one or more opened files, or close the process that opened these files.
This utility is especially useful if you try to delete/move/open a file and you get one of the following error messages:
* Cannot delete [filename]: There has been a sharing violation. The source or destination file may be in use.
* Cannot delete [filename]: It is being used by another person or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.
When you get one of these error messages, OpenedFilesView will show you which process lock your file. Closing the right process will solve this problem. Optionally, you can also release the file by closing the handle from OpenedFilesView utility. However, be aware that after closing a file in this way, the program that opened the file may become unstable, and even crash.
Actually it is much easier and simpler to use Unlocker to solve the problem of unable to delete files. I’d prefer to use OpenedFilesView to manually check on systems to see what is being loaded especially trojan, spyware or virus.