Try, try again

This is really one of the most maddening things that OS X does:

The disk "Foo" is in use and could not be ejected.

Try quitting applications and try again.

Hey, you’re the damn computer – try telling me what those applications are! Try telling me what files are in use! Try letting me override!

Quentin Stafford-Fraser commented on Tue Sep 13 04:29:25 2005:

Agreed - this has always bugged me, and Windows does just the same.

Linux has an ‘fuser’ command which allows you to find out which processes are using a disk - you can do something like fuser -vm /home. I haven’t found an equivalent in OS X, though there may be some combination of options to lsof which would give you something similar.

Either way, it should really be a button in the dialog box that would give you the info.

Russell Edwards commented on Thu Sep 15 03:20:56 2005:

Good call Quentin, man lsof reveals lsof +D [path] . Worked great for me.

Paul commented on Fri Sep 16 05:59:25 2005:

Very nice!

Michael Abbott commented on Sun Jul 22 01:08:11 2007:

I know I’m two years late, but I had the same problem today, and found this page on google.

I found that you can force an eject in the terminal: cd /Volumes and then type

hdiutil eject -force drive-name/

and it’s gone! No idea really how safe this is. I quit everything first, but didn’t want to reboot.