[ILUG] How do you find out *why* a filesystem is busy?

[Ray Kelly]

Ronan Cunniffe wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> There must (surely?) be a kernel table somewhere with this stuff in it -
> locking can't (can it?) be left to the process in case it core dumps, so is
>  there any way of asking "tell me which processes are using /var/spool/mail?"

lsof & fuser are yer men here
 
>  So can anyone a) solve the problem, and b) explain how the kernel actually
>  *does* handle this?

> And "kill everything in sight" is not an acceptable answer for (a)...

just kill the offending stuff :)

	Ray ...