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I have an app that writes data to a local disk file regularly. It always opens, writes, then closes the file. Recently I had an issue where it stopped writing data, and this was due to it being unable to open the file because of a sharing violation. The situation seemed to be permanent.

Process Explorer showed a handle to the file held by the System process, PID 4. As soon as I forced this handle to close, my app behaved normally again.

Now I have my suspicions, as the file can also be accessed from other machines on the network, but the file is always opened briefly and closed again, and always with flags of "RW-", and the app is designed to cope with these brief accesses from elsewhere. The handle that was holding the file open had flags shown as "R--" by process explorer.

My questions: how can I find out more about a handle owned by the System process, and what sort of process might be holding the file open such that I wasn't able to write to it?

Oliver Salzburg
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rossmcm
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1 Answers1

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You are probably correct in suspecting that the file was being accessed via the network. Other things I could speculate about would be the indexing service or your antivirus, but I do not think that any of those would show up as "System".

I do not think there is any way to obtain any more information about a handle than process explorer.

Perhaps there is a bug in the way your application "is designed to cope with these brief accesses from elsewhere"? You could post code on CodeReview and ask people if they see any problem with it.

Mike Nakis
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