Sharing files and folders is nothing new for Microsoft Windows users. If you have a home or office network, you can easily share folders so other people can access your files from their computer over the network. If you get to a point where you have created a bunch of shares and are starting to lose track of what folders you have shared, then there’s an easy way to see them all in one place and even manage them if needed.
To view your shares, you will need to open Computer Management on the computer with the shared folders or connect to that computer using your local Computer Management interface. To open the Computer Management console, simply right click on This PC and choose Manage, or type in Computer Management in the Run box.
Once the Computer Management console opens, you can navigate to Shared Folders and then Shares. All your shares, as well as the administrative shares I just discussed, will be shown there. You will see the path, as well as how many other clients are currently connected to that share.
You can do things such as stop sharing a folder and edit shares from here by right clicking on a particular share and choosing the appropriate option. You can even create new shares from the Action menu, or by right clicking a blank area and choosing New Share.
If you click on the Sessions item on the left, then you will be able to see who is currently connected to that computer remotely. Here you can see the username of the person connected, as well as the computer name that they are making the connection from. You can also see how long they have been connected and how many files they have opened. You can even close out their connection by right clicking on it and choosing Close Session.
The Open Files area will show you what files and folders the connected users are accessing. Right clicking on a particular file will give you an option to close that open file. Don’t expect this to be too straightforward though. You may see multiple entries for the same folder path and Windows doesn’t tell you the file names for the most part. Each of these entries is a handle and if you try to close one, it may not have an effect, and you may have to try to close all of them.
If you would like to view shared information on a remote computer from your local computer, then you can open Computer Management locally, right click on Computer Management at the top left, choose Connect to another computer, and type in the name of that remote computer. Then you will be able to perform the same tasks you were able to do while logged in locally to that same computer.
There is also a PowerShell command you can run (as admin) which can show you a list of files currently open over SMB (Server Message Block) on your Windows system, and filters the output to display just these three details:
- ClientUserName – the username of the person who has the file open over the network
- ClientComputerName – the name of the computer they’re using to connect
- Path – the full path to the file or folder that’s open (Sometimes it only shows the folder)
Here is the command.
Get-SmbOpenFile | Select ClientUserName, ClientComputerName, Path
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