Anyone who has to use Windows and suffers this, PowerToys is your friend. Locksmith identifies what's locking your file and allows you to free it up. Dunno why PowerToys isn't bundled by default tbh.
post
mv: cannot move 'a' to 'b': Device or resource busy
Sorry, but disk erasure is not available in the trial version of Disk© Partition® Wizard™ 2002. To use this feature, please upgrade to Disk© Partition® Wizard™ Pro 2002 for just $49.99 at Whythefuckdoievenneedthis.co.uk/shop
Nowadays it would be $19.99 per month and it's a one year contract that renews three months before expiration.
My first attempt at running Arch, I managed to fuck it up so badly that I had to write a script to write zeros to every bit of my HDD. Fun times.
Wtf did you do lol I’m scared
Honestly don't even remember, but it was in my peak "know enough to be dangerous" days in college. I almost certainly didn't have to go that nuclear to fix it, but that's what I did.
Take 2 of Arch, after that wipe was completed, went pretty well. It revived an old piece of shit laptop for another few years before its motherboard gave out.
I’ll wager guess it was something to do with confusing GPT and MBR partitioning. There was a time where some BIOSs and loaders only understood or preferred one over the other, leading to weird incongruences depending on what you’re using to look at the disk. You have to actually overwrite the partition tables to get a clean start.
"oh you want to delete your entire root directory lol go right ahead"
I think it asks "Are you sure?" now first.
‘rm -rf /*’ for the win. I was on a production system when I learned I used that combo far too much. Thankfully, lots were deleted and my crimes were never detected.
Inodes can be kept active by unlinked filehandles, a fun way to spend a afternoon figuring out where all the space went.
Lsof is your friend.
Meanwhile chromeOS had a stroke because I asked to set a wallpaper
ChromeOS is so funny because it's either way too anal about what you can do or there's a part they forgot to harden against end users and the power of linux spews forth with endless destructive potential
Windows, too. Turns out, there's a hard-coded image size limit. If you've got a ~5k screen or bigger, or equivalent size virtual desktop with multiple monitors - you gotta find a way to compress it below limit. Nope, webp is not accepted, even though it is perfectly capable of using it.
Windows: Noooo, You can't delete and merge this partition!!!1!!!!1!
Linux:
PARTITION DELETION
Had a call to sort an issue where someone couldn't open an excel file because they already had it open don't know why that needed a warning over a simple window switch to the sheet they wanted but hey stopped me doing what I was doing for nothing
Yeah, needing to use Microsoft Office for everything at work is a damn pain. This one time I am trying to close Word, but then I must have clicked the top right X one too many times so the "You can't close Word until the Closing... dialog is dismissed" dialog pops up, which itself interrupts the Closing dialog...
Screen photo
You also can't open two spreadsheets that have the same filename. I'm sure that's led to a helpdesk call or two.
I lost a lot of respect for Microsoft when I first saw that issue. It's such an easy to avoid limitation. Like probably a similar level of difficulty to remove that limitation than to write the error message explaining it, unless it's more of a spaghetti mess than I'm expecting it to be.
"Hello, yes, IT department? I think my co-worker's keyboard is missing all their punctuation marks. Yes, it's making communication very difficult."
I just use my browser for pdfs lol
foxit pdf reader
VLC: Sure, just move the podcast you're listening to in another directory while listening.
The Tux reminds me of playing Super Tux Kart today... I really hate that GIMP mascot now,
This is funny, because copying files to a USB flashdrive, is just inherently disfunctional in linux.
TRUE!!! Why "user friendly" distros does not mount removable drives with sync option by default is beyond me.
Hang on there is a sync option? Does that make the progressbar work? If so why is it not enabled?
Yep. Almost all operating systems have a bufor that tell programs file was moved when it is still in the process. It makes perfect sense, it speed things up and extends the lifespan of the device.
You can flush that bufor manually with just the sync command or disable it for whole partition with -o sync option. Technically you should unmount drives before unplugging for safety anyway, but people are stupid or more important lazy and in my opinion for external devices mounting with sync really should be the default. Maybe some low-level developer would disagree.
Many many years ago, it's one of the things that made me switch to Linux. Moving and renaming files while using them was kind of a game changer.

top 50 comments