get PIDs of processes from

Question

I have a path to an executable. Assume I want to delete this file.

I need to find all processes launched using this file and kill them. What is the best way to do it?

Answer 1

Maybe lsof (list open files) could help you there.

To list all process that are using a specific file:

lsof /path/to/your/specific/file

Adding the -t option will only return PIDs that use the given file.

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So, from there, you can kill all process that are using the specific file :

lsof -t /path/to/your/specific/file | while read PID; do kill -9 $PID; done

Or something like :

kill -9 $(lsof -t /path/to/your/specific/file)

Answer 2

Now, assuming you are in the *nix world, you can use fuser command.

fuser <file_name>

will list you all process pids using the file. To kill processes accessing the file,

fuser -k <file_name>

Answer 3

Assuming you're referring to Windows you can use Process Monitor from the Windows SysInternals suite