Open File Resources

By Paul Waterstraat, Geology Department

 
The following resources are available to help you track down open files.

For the Macintosh. Alsoft has developed a module that can be installed in your Control Strip that gives you a continuous report of the number of files you have open. The module is free and can be downloaded from: http://www.Alsoft.com/AskAl/download.html

Select "Open File Count Control Strip Module (4 KB)". Drag the resulting file onto your System Folder. After you reboot you can access the open file count in your Control Strip.

Another tool is an application that lists all the files currently open on your system. The application is free and can be downloaded from Alsoft at: http://www.Alsoft.com/AskAl/download.html

Select "List Open Files Utility (28 KB)"

For OpenVMS. Open VMS has a built-in command for listing the names of open files on each disk. The command is:

$ show device/files

For UNIX. The lsof (list open files) program can be downloaded from a variety of sources, including: ftp://vic.cc.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/lsof/lsof.tar.Z. (This site limits access to eight connections at a time. When you are prompted to enter a password, type your email address.)

For Windows. I'm told that the best tool to use is the good old task manager, accessible by pressing control-alt-delete on an NT system. This tool allows you to see which applications are open, which processes and services are currently running, how many resources are being utilized by each task and a general overview of current resource allocation globally across the system. There are some processes which do not show up on the task manager, but since they are assigned a Process ID (PID) you can usually get a sense of the total number of open files.

As for the various flavors of Windows 9x, its task manager is very limited, showing only major applications that are running, plus some TSRs.

Another good resource for Windows NT is "Handle," a utility written by Mark Russinovich that displays information about open handles for any process in the Windows NT system. You can use it to see the programs that have a file open, or to see the object types and names of all the handles of a program.

A GUI-based version of this program, "HandleEx for Windows NT," is also available at Systems Internals: http://www.sysinternals.com/nthandle.htm.

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