Automatically solve rm cannot remove path : device or resource busy error

Question

I am trying to remove a directory /path/to/dir using the rm -rf command. Unfortunately I get the error

rm: cannot remove '/path/to/dir/.nfsdda293a660f276ca0000000a': Device or resource busy

After a little bit of research, I realized that I need to find which process is using this file before I can delete it:

lsof /path/to/dir/.nfsdda293a660f276ca0000000a

which will return something with the PID associated with the process:

COMMAND   PID
python    28594

I then kill the PID and try again to delete, but I still get the initial error.

How to force the script to delete /path/to/dir automatically within a script, without manual intervention?

Greensward

Do in the script exactly what you do manually. Capture the output of lsof to get the PID to kill and kill it the same method as you would manually. – Atli

@Nic3500, why use lsof then instead of fuser -k to do both steps (find the process and kill it) at once? – Deranged

Answer 1

This worked for me:

lsof +D /path

That will recurse through the filesystem under /path, so beware doing it on large directory trees.

Once you know which processes have files open, you can exit those apps, or kill them with the kill(1) command.

Credit: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/11238/how-to-get-over-device-or-resource-busy

Tameshatamez

Answer 2

With so many complicated answers on here which is confusing everybody, please just do the following.

umount directoryname

then try again e.g.

rm -rf directoryname

Cascabel

umount doesn't work while there are open handles, unless using -f (to "force" the unmount and make future syscalls made by the running programs fail) or -l (a "lazy" unmount, that only does half the job immediately and does the other half when the handles are closed... meaning that the filesystem isn't really released immediately). – Deranged

Answer 3

In case the @Hayden answer didn't help you (returns nothing or such), this command can be handy:

umount /path

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credit

Cinerarium