Linux – How to see which processes locked a file

There are tools, such as Sysinternal's Process Explorer, that can find and forcibly close file handles, however the state and behaviour of the application (both yours and, in this case, IIS) after doing this is undefined. Some won't care, some will error and others will crash hard.

The correct solution is to take the outage and allow IIS to cleanly release locks and clean up after itself to preserve server stability. If this is not possible, you can either create another site on the same box, or set up a new box with the new content, and move the domain name/IP across to "promote" the new content to production.

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)