Removing a "busy" text file?

[Tim Smith]

On Sunday 30 Jan 2005 19:59, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> richard at seamus: ~/music/Howard Shore
> $ rm -rf THELO~1H/
> rm: cannot remove `THELO~1H//Concerning Hobbits.mp3': Text file busy
>
> running ls gives:
>
> richard at seamus: ~/music/Howard Shore/THELO~1H
> $ ls -laF
> total 8
> drwxrwxrwx  1 richard 504 4096 Jan 30 11:52 ./
> drwxrwxrwx  1 richard 504 4096 Jan 30 11:47 ../
> -rwxrwxrwx  1 richard 504    0 Jan 30 11:48 Concerning Hobbits.mp3*
>
>
> I've shut down KAudioCreator and used ps to see if there is still a
> KAudioCreator process running, but I can't find one.
>
> How could the file be busy?  I'm not looking at it in any other program. 
> I've tried to delete it in several ways, even su'ing to root to do so.
>
> Any thoughts?  What could be causing this, and how can I fix it?

Well, in the extreme a reboot should fix it, but you don't really want to do 
that. The /sbin/fuser command (part of the psmisc package) will tell you 
what process is holding the file open. You can then kill the process in 
question (most likely a KDE ioslave), and you should be able to remove the 
file.


-- 
Tim Smith <tim at electronghost.co.uk>
"I cannot test the USB because the user interface is encrypted."
    -- Hugo Tyson