Jan
12

Error Deleting File or Folder? Delete an in-use (locked) file

Author: miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG | Posted in: Freeware, Windows | 41 Comments
 

How often have you come across a message like, “Error Deleting File or Folder” while trying to delete one? For me, it’s been a frequent occurence while trying to get rid of some spyware file that I spotted on my system and invariably on each occasion I’ve been rebuffed with a message like that. To add to the frustration, no further details are provided about WHY such an error crept us, except for maybe a little elaboration on the lines of…

“Cannot delete file: Access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.”

Error Deleting File or Folder

Pretty insightful, eh ? The message comes in various other flavours too…

  • There has been a sharing violation.
  • The file is in use by another program or user.
  • The source or destination file may be in use.

Such misbehaving executables / files can be quite difficult to get rid of and for the really desperate it might involve quite a few reboot-delete-reboot or reboot into safe mode-delete-reboot cycles. Wastage of time & effort if you ask me. Isn’t there any way out of this mess?

Well fear not, for there are quite a few handy utilities out there which can do the same for you in one swift stroke, without requiring you to reboot anyhow. One such noteworthy application is Unlocker. It’s a freeware that does a real good job of unlocking and deleting such files. IMHO, it might be the best all-rounder in this category.

Once installed, it adds a menu option named “Unlocker” in the right-click context menu that pop-ups when you press the right mouse button in Windows Explorer while pointing at any file or folder. Coolest part is that you would never require to bring up this dialogue manually. When you encounter a locked file, the window pops-up on it’s own and asks you to take an action.

Unlocker Pop-up Menu

Selecting the Unlocker option pop’s up a window showing the locking status of a file or folder, along with a list of processes that are currently maintaining locks on it. Also listed are the handles, process id’s and execution paths of each process.

Unlocker Window Screenshot

You’re provided with three direct action buttons – Kill Process, Unlock and Unlock All. Using Kill, you can kill any particular process in the list. Similarly Unlock will release the lock maintained by a single process while and Unlock All will release all the locks on the file.

Note that, this doesn’t delete the file – it simply removes the locks on it enabling you to safely delete it. For the actual deletion, they’ve provided you with a dropdown box that gives you the option of Deleting / Renaming / Moving / Copying the file in question.

On some rare occasions, the lock cannot be released owing to some complications – there you’re given the option to mark the file for deletion upon reboot. But on 99% cases, you wouldn’t require a reboot.

Lets say with this tool I got a totally new-found sense of freedom on the Windows genre of OS-es. So what are you waiting for? It’s FREE, it’s tiny and it’s as useful as it can be. Get Unlocker today.

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41 Responses to “Error Deleting File or Folder? Delete an in-use (locked) file”

  • 1
    On July 6th, 2007 at 5:03 am  |  Permalink
    bandit said:

    gimana cara download na
    pleazz
    kayak mana
    ??????????

  • 2
    On August 31st, 2007 at 10:07 pm  |  Permalink
    Mauricio D. said:

    Love it. It works.

    Keep up the good work!

  • 3
    On September 2nd, 2007 at 6:59 pm  |  Permalink
    miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:

    Mauricio: Glad you found the tool useful :) That makes me feel like the review was well worth it.

  • 4
    On October 13th, 2007 at 7:28 pm  |  Permalink
    Art said:

    So, what if this doesn’t do it?
    Pocket Killbox doesn’t either.
    Neither does Microsoft’s ProcessExplorer.

    I’m about to try del /P “PathOfFile” in the safe mode, which just better work!

    Re: AutoCAD files. Apparently they are protected under Windows/XP Professional, but Home Edition is too stupid to deal with it.

    - Art

  • 5
    On December 31st, 2007 at 3:55 am  |  Permalink
    Drew said:

    OMG!! this worked like a charm!! thanks sooo much!!! i have uploaded an .avi file on my gps memory card and the couldn’t delete it. But this program has saved my but from formatting the whole thing!!!!! THANKS A MILLION!!!!!

    Drew

  • 6
    On January 17th, 2008 at 11:23 am  |  Permalink
    miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:

    Cheers Drew. Glad you found it so useful. :)

  • 7
    On February 23rd, 2008 at 4:40 am  |  Permalink
    Melissa said:

    Oh, thank you!!! I had a desktop icon that just wouldn’t die.

  • 8
    On April 6th, 2008 at 5:11 pm  |  Permalink
    sami said:

    thank you !!

  • 9
    On June 29th, 2008 at 8:31 am  |  Permalink
    mike paget said:

    Awesome. Tryed to kill some of old icons for a long time and now it is gone.

  • 10
    On July 15th, 2008 at 4:24 am  |  Permalink
    Entreview.com said:

    Error Deleting File or Folder? Delete an in-use (locked) file » Chaos Laboratory…

    If you’ve ever encountered those frustrating locked / in-use files which you’ve been consistently trying to delete, you should read this post….

  • 11
    On July 17th, 2008 at 2:56 am  |  Permalink
    Iain said:

    THIS IS AN EXCELLENT LITTLE PIECE OF SOFTWARE.

    I love it. I have been plagued by such problems for so long now.

    Excellent review.

  • 12
    On July 17th, 2008 at 3:14 am  |  Permalink
    miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:

    Thanks Iain. Unlocker is simply too good and bails you out from the tightest corners… :D

    Cheers,
    m^e

  • 13
    On July 30th, 2008 at 8:11 pm  |  Permalink
    iunno said:

    this will not work if a file is in a recursive directory and the folder names are for example c:/program files/configuration.old/configuration.old/configuration.old/… and so on. this appears to be a windows limitation, you’ll have to rename the folder names to something shorter to be able to delete them.

  • 14
    On August 21st, 2008 at 8:40 pm  |  Permalink
    Luke said:

    This does not work with XP Pro x64

  • 15
    On September 4th, 2008 at 6:09 am  |  Permalink
    miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:

    @Luke: Unfortunately Unlocker doesn’t work with x64 systems and as far as I know there aren’t any x64 compatible releases yet.

    Alternatively, you can use Process Explorer. This one has a “Find Handle” command, which searches for open files and gives you a list of applications that currently have a lock on them.

    Cheers,
    m^e

  • 16
    On October 8th, 2008 at 1:03 pm  |  Permalink
    x said:

    I hate windows. You shouldn’t have to do find a freeware program to do what windows should be able to do. I don’t ever have this problem at home on my macs.

  • 17
    On November 7th, 2008 at 12:35 am  |  Permalink
    Alma said:

    THIS WORKS!! After numerous try and programs and tech help….this one program actually work…..
    thank-you….^_^

  • 18
    On December 14th, 2008 at 11:28 am  |  Permalink
    denis said:

    thx

  • 19
    On May 29th, 2009 at 8:15 pm  |  Permalink
    Revathi said:

    Thanks a lot.This one saved my time.I wasted 2 days to delete a folder.

  • 20
    On June 1st, 2009 at 7:25 am  |  Permalink
    sanju sinha said:

    I’ve been using the soft at http://www.pathtoolong.com that resolves the long filename & path issue and deletes locked files.
    Sanju

  • 21
    On June 8th, 2009 at 3:02 pm  |  Permalink
    jebak kumar said:

    how to deleted kido virus from machine

  • 22
    On June 12th, 2009 at 7:33 pm  |  Permalink
    Dustin said:

    Thanks so much :)

  • 23
    On June 17th, 2009 at 5:22 pm  |  Permalink
    DevPunk said:

    is required do right-click in any disk unit to unlock.
    one file that want to delete the program says: not found it locked

    so any action to delete and not delete this file. >:(

    what’s process to correct unlock and delete ?

    Greetings :)

  • 24
    On July 20th, 2009 at 11:24 am  |  Permalink
    Superman said:

    WOW! IT’S THE BEST FILE SHREDDER SOFTWARE I EVER HAD!!!

  • 25
    On July 20th, 2009 at 11:26 am  |  Permalink
    Superman said:

    Thanksss soooooooooooooooooooooooo muchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
    Thanks a million!

  • 26
    On July 22nd, 2009 at 7:51 pm  |  Permalink
    Simanta Sarma said:

    Really you are genius. I am very grateful to you for letting me know about this great software. Many Thanks.

  • 27
    On August 2nd, 2009 at 1:22 pm  |  Permalink
    Shah said:

    Impressive. it works! and its free!

  • 28
    On August 2nd, 2009 at 8:13 pm  |  Permalink
    Alwyn said:

    thanks man really appreciate it

  • 29
    On August 6th, 2009 at 3:53 pm  |  Permalink
    Dan Muniz said:

    dude you rock! I had a couple of files that would not delete or transfer to different location. I read this and downloaded the unlocker tool and it worked! Thanks for the post, you made my day.

  • 30
    On September 8th, 2009 at 10:59 am  |  Permalink
    robin said:

    thanks a lot,,,,,,,
    i have tried for deleting the file for past 3day.
    but now with the help of unlocker. i deleted that stupid file.
    thanks a lot,,,,
    its realy great…..
    hats offffff……
    :)

  • 31
    On September 9th, 2009 at 11:11 pm  |  Permalink
    Ian said:

    WOW – this is soooooo easy, Thank you for this it has saved me time and effirt in tidying up my Hard drives

  • 32
    On September 12th, 2009 at 6:39 pm  |  Permalink
    spiderman said:

    thank you………….very much……………….

  • 33
    On September 13th, 2009 at 8:26 am  |  Permalink
    Alex said:

    It worked. I had a folder that wouldn’t delete because the error message states that the specified file cannot be found. I downloaded the Unlocker and although it wasn’t able to unlock the hidden spyware file(s) in the folder, it gave me an option to delete and magically deleted the folder for me.

    Thanks.

  • 34
    On September 29th, 2009 at 12:19 am  |  Permalink
    Taurus said:

    Thank you very much. Unlocker is amazing. This freeware works perfectly fine. It unlocked and deleted the files without restarted. i have tested it on Windows XP Professional and Windows 2005 Server and works well.

    Thanks

  • 35
    On October 24th, 2009 at 11:08 pm  |  Permalink
    Lloyd said:

    Downloaded some dodgy porn for a laugh which I couldn’t delete, got really worried but unlocker allowed me to delete it, phew :)

  • 36
    On December 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm  |  Permalink
    Mike said:

    Entirely too easy. You’re supposed to suffer correcting problems like this. I had some corrupt files while trying to do a restore. When trying to restore correctly I couldn’t move them. They weren’t locked, but the program still deleted them without a problem.

    This was the first search item I looked up and it was perfect. Wish they were all this simple. Thank you very much.

  • 37
    On December 8th, 2009 at 12:23 pm  |  Permalink
    YEAH said:

    THANKS A LOT !

  • 38
    On December 12th, 2009 at 2:22 am  |  Permalink
    Jorge said:

    I just wanted to say Thank you. I had an 8 gb file taking up space for the longest time, and in less than 1 minute that it took to DL and install i deleted it completely.. THANK YOU

  • 39
    On December 13th, 2009 at 3:58 am  |  Permalink
    clats said:

    Unlocker says it deletes file, but it is still there…Any ideas????

  • 40
    On December 15th, 2009 at 12:34 pm  |  Permalink
    miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG said:

    @clats: What file are you trying to delete? Some sort of system / cache / dll ? Can you elaborate on it a bit. Maybe easier to diagnose that way.

  • 41
    On December 31st, 2009 at 2:15 pm  |  Permalink
    Kevin said:

    You haven’t explained why the problem occurs, just sold a product. I get it EVERYTIME I move a .mov file from my camera to the computer. I cannot delete the file from the camera! I have to reformat the card.

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