Tasklist

I’m sure that someone reading this will ask, “how did you not know that?”. But sometimes the simplest things come to us late in the game while others knew it early on.

I’ve been patching Oracle on Windows since the Windows NT days.  Everyone who patches Oracle on Windows knows that OPatch will often balk at the fact that some DLL files are locked by other processes. The easiest way for me to get around this is to just rename the DLL files that will be replaced by the patch. The OS won’t let you delete the DLL files, but you can rename them and then OPatch can proceed. In the early days of OPatch, I would run the apply, it would spit out the DLL that was locked. I would rename the DLL file and then run OPatch again to get the next DLL file that was locked. This process would repeat about 20 times until OPatch found no locked DLL files. At least now when you run OPatch, it gives you a full list of DLL files that are locked.

Sometimes I want to know process that is locking the DLL file. In the past, I would download one of those freely available utilities to show me the process(es) locking the file in question and terminate the process. But I don’t like freeware bloating up my servers so I often remove the utility when I am done. Until the next time I need that utility…

Someone recently pointed me to Metalink Note 294350.1 which contained one little nugget I was not privy to prior to reading this document. Apparently, Windows includes a command-line utility to show which processes are locking DLL files. I can now do:
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tasklist /m

The output can be long, so it is beneficial to store the output in a file and then open up the file in a text editor:

tasklist /m > c:\oracle\task_list.txt
notepad c:\oracle\task_list.txt

I can then use the text editor’s search function to locate the DLL in question.

Now how is it that this little utility has escaped my attention all these years?