Windows – How to make Apache case sensitive on Windows and/or Mac

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

To find a specific file, use the menu option Find->Find Handle or DLL... Type in part of the path to the file. The list of processes will appear below.

If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool Handle, that lists open handles.

Examples

• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "e:\" (finds all files opened from drive e:\"
• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "file-or-path-in-question"

You say "(I know, I know)", but behave as if you don't know, so I'll explain :)

Just randomly deleting folders called apache2 is not likely to be effective. For one thing, apache isn't actually called apache; it's proper name is "httpd", by the Apache Foundation, so the most important files are probably called httpd on your system.

But the lesson to learn here is NOT that you deleted the wrong filenames. It's that you tried to delete things manually when operating systems provide uninstallers (or better, package management tools) for this sort of thing.

You also seem to be unaware of apachectl, which will help you stop the apache processes from a command line, and the system preferences, which let you do it from a GUI.

You might find this useful, for cleaning up:

http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/DistrosDefaultLayout#Mac_OS_X_.28Leopard.2C_Apache_2.2.29: