There are several threads on SO that describe how to check which application creates a file with tools like Sysinternals process monitor. Is something like this possible programmatically from .net?
Background: My program has to remote-control a proprietary third party application using its automation interface, and one of the functions I need from this application has a bug where it creates a bunch of temporary files in %TEMP% that are called tmpXXXX.tmp (the same as .net's Path.GetTempFileName() does) but does not delete them. This causes the C drive to become full over time, eventually failing the application. I already filed a bug to the manufacturer, but we need a temporary workaround for the time being, so I thought of putting a FileSystemWatcher on %TEMP% that watches tmp*.tmp, collects these files, and after the operation on the third-party application finishes, deletes them. But this is risky as another application might also write files with the same file name pattern to %TEMP% so I only want to delete those created by NastyBuggyThirdPartyApplication.exe.
Is this anyhow possible?
This kind of things is possible, but maybe a bit tricky.
To know who created the file, look at the user that owns it. Therefore you might need to create a specific user, and that application will run under this specific user. In order to do that, you need to create a small application that will start your buggy app by impersonating another user, so anything done within the app will be under this user so as file creating...
I don't know how to monitor and get triggered when a file is created, but nothing can prevent you from setting a timer that wakes up every five or ten minutes, then checks if any file in the directory is owned by the application user and closed, so it deletes it.
Maybe if they react fast for this bug fixing, you won't need your app very long time. So another solution, if possible might just to change the Temp folder into another drive, which has lots of space...