Killing a file handled process
You may have faced the problem which a dead/unreferenced process is holding a file descriptor to a file, so that you cant delete it using rm command, and giving an error message like below: Cannot delete folder with rm -rf. Error: device or resource busy Here what you have to do is to identify the process been hanged and kill it. lsof +D this will give you a list of process which are accessing files in the given folder. kill that session using: kill if you still couldn't kill it use below. kill -s SEGV 'via Blog this'