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Accepted
jamone
Asked: 2010-07-12 12:21:58 +0800 CST

OS X determine which application is accessing a HDD and preventing ejection?

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I'm running OS X 10.6 Server, and I want to eject my external drive so I can do some disk maintenance such as defraging it. However when I try to eject the drive it fails saying the disk is in use. I can force eject it but that could cause corruption... How can I tell which application is using the drive and holding it open?

hard-drive mac-osx-server mac-osx

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/External, where "External" would be the name of your external drive. Are you hosting any services' data off of that drive?

    • 43

  2. lsof - List of open files

    At your command promt just type sudo lsof to see a list of open files and their location and process id so that you can kill the process.

    To refine it a little bit you could use sudo lsof | grep hard drive name.

    Once you have the pid sudo kill -9 pid to kill the naughty process.

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  3. Use this cmdline to find the processes access to your drive:

    sudo lsof | grep -v -e"^COMMAND" | grep -i YOUR_DRIVE_NAME | sort -u -k 1,2 | perl -n -e's/^\w+\s+(\d+).*/ps -p $1/; print $_'
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