mark++

Here are some CMD tools you probably didn’t think existed:

• findstr - Like Unix grep
• tasklist - Like Unix ps
• taskkill - Like Unix kill

These come for free with recent versions of Windows. You might be wondering why Microsoft chose these names instead of their well-known, pre-existing Unix equivalents? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect this has something to do with it.

Anyway, here’s a nice trick:

C:\>tasklist /m msvcrt.dll

Image Name                     PID Modules
========================= ======== ===============
OUTLOOK.EXE                   3576 MSVCRT.dll
cmd.exe                       2616 msvcrt.dll
vim.exe                       3816 msvcrt.dll
iTunes.exe                    3776 msvcrt.dll
firefox.exe                   2912 msvcrt.dll

Whip that one out next time you can’t delete a directory because some DLL is in-use.