When Windows refuses to let you rename folders
The past few months I’ve had it happen more and more that Microsoft Windows refused to eject a thumb drive or refused to let me rename folders.
Windows will helpfully tell you that this is likely because another program is still working with the file/folder/drive, but doesn’t tell you the name of the offending program.
Since this sort of thing generally happens two minutes before I pack up and leave for home, I’ve thus far simply ignored the problem. Today, however, Windows once again refused to let me rename a folder and I had the time to play the detective.
Today I found out that the program that has been hijacking my OS was a program called TGitCache.exe, which is a helper tool for Tortoise Git, which in turn is a version control package. A lot of my customers have started using version control recently and it makes sense therefore that I’ve only started to experience this in the last six months or so.
The Tortoise folks have said in response to a bug report about this issue that they’ve released a new version of the program in which they changed so much, they’re now closing the bug report.
Note that in your case it’s probably a different program. It’s probably a program you can see in your task bar. I singled out TGitCache.exe in this post because it runs in the background. This post is mostly useful for people who have noticed similar behaviour since they started working with Tortoise Git.
Update 8 October 2016: a simpler way than trawling Google for answers is to use Windows’ Resource Monitor which has a tab called Associated Handles (Broncontrole respectively Gekoppelde Ingangen in Dutch) which you can search for the name of your file. It will list all processes that currently have a lock on your file or folder. See here for further explanations.
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