Forcing closed an open file by C#

Question

I found a similar question here but it was closed/accepted with an answer of \"don\'t do that\".

I\'m in a situation where I don\'t care what happens to the other ap

Answer 1

    foreach (var process in Process.GetProcessesByName("excel")) //whatever you need to close 
    {
        if (process.MainWindowTitle.Contains("test.xlsx"))
        {
            process.Kill();
            break;
        }
    }

or

    foreach (var process in Process.GetProcesses())
    {
        if (process.MainWindowTitle.Contains("test.dat"))
        {
            process.Kill();
            break;
        }
    }

Answer 2

This is probably irrelevant and if it is please someone comment but there was a work-around I've used in explorer before to get around file locks.
If a file was locked by a process that had died Windows often wouldn't let you delete it but if you created a new file of the same name somewhere else, moved it to the folder it would succeed. You could then delete the new file and all was well.
To use this for your app you'd have to be able to read the file and hold it in memory before you did this then you write it back out after you'd got rid of the old one.
Maybe it will help, maybe not but it's worth trying.

Answer 3

First you can use this post to verify that it's the dodgy app that's locking them:

How do I find out which process is locking a file using .NET?

Then this post outlines a way to close them:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharplanguage/thread/04a1e899-2a38-4d95-8ed5-6d53344e4d76