Question

I’m trying to deploy a patch to a service I created and replace the service file.
For that reason I need to stop the service so the file will be released.
I’m using sc \\remote stop svcname, then I query the service using sc \\remote query svcname until I see that it’s state is STOPPED.
At this point the service file should be unlocked, and to be on the safe side I also delete the service using sc \\remote delete svcname.

Still, it doesn’t seem to release the file and any deletion or change attempt fails.
I know one solution might be polling the file repeatedly, but I want to avoid this method.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Windows don’t ensure the process providing the service terminates when the service is stopped (the process may provide more than one service). It just considers the service stopped when it handles the message sent to it.

So if the service process has a bug and does not properly release resources, they may still be locked. I would probably wait a little and than simply terminate the process.

There is also a tool from Microsoft called handle.exe (this is command-line version, they also have a GUI-one) that can list which processes hold the file open. It should be possible to get the same information programmatically, but I am not sure of the exact calls to make (and you need administrator privileges; you have to give them to the tool too). That way you can check whether the file is open, by which process and wait for it to terminate or force-terminate it if you didn’t know which one it is.