"A process is writing to a 200GB file" There's two problems here, the process and the file, it seems you need to deal with both situations on both styles of OS

"A process is writing to a 200GB file" There's two problems here, the process and the file, it seems you need to deal with both situations on both styles of OS. You could truncate the file (there's also a `truncate` command I have never used): cat /dev/null > somefile and let the process continue writing, or you could just `rm` the file, then either kill the process (or the other way round), or if you've got mysterious disk space usage issues you think are due to still open but deleted files you can: lsof | grep deleted I'm an ex (mostly) sysadmin and so this stuff is easy, but is obviously out of reach for "normal" users. Personally as someone who still uses Unix-like machines (Mac, servers) and Windows (games, chkdsk) and I greatly prefer the Linux/Unix way and find the Windows way frustrating.