Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!gargoyle!att!cbnews!lvc
From: lvc@cbnews.ATT.COM (Lawrence V. Cipriani)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: umount : fs busy
Message-ID: <1094@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 7 Sep 88 12:02:04 GMT
References: <27261@neabbs.UUCP>
Reply-To: lvc@cbnews.ATT.COM (Lawrence V. Cipriani)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 18

In article <27261@neabbs.UUCP> psloot@neabbs.UUCP (PAUL SLOOTMAN) writes:
>When I want to umount a filesystem, I sometimes (entirely correctly)
>get the message "umount failed: file system busy".
> 
>My uestion is: how can I find out who or what is keeping it busy?
>Obviously it can be found, 'cos umount knows about it. The system
>in question is SysV.

See /etc/fuser(1M) in the UNIX(tm) Administrators Reference Manual.
fuser can tell you what process id's are using a file or file system.
fuser will even kill those processes with the -k option.  This can
be useful when shutting down a machine, though fuser can be very slow.
I found /etc/killall to be a better solution when shutting down.
If you use the -u option of fuser it will give the user names that
owns the process.

-- 
Larry Cipriani, AT&T Network Systems, Columbus OH, cbnews!lvc lvc@cbnews.ATT.COM