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I've created a hard link (not symbolic link) Arial.ttf in my user directory using the Git for Windows GNU tool ln.exe and Bash. The link points to the system font C:\Windows\Fonts\arial.ttf.

ln /c/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf ~/Fonts/Arial.ttf

The Windows font file and (for some reason) my link, are constantly locked for use by csrss.exe, which is a process described by Microsoft Answers as:

...the user-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem (with Win32.sys being the kernel-mode portion). Csrss stands forclient/server run-time subsystem and is an essential subsystem that must be running at all times.

Hence, I assume it is impossible to kill the process without risking serious stability issues, and the link file cannot be deleted while locked.

How can I get rid of it?

Jonathan Holvey
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    Use a windows native tool like `mklink` instead to create it or add the fonts folder do your path? Why are you even creating that link? Or create an actual copy of the file? – Seth Jan 09 '18 at 13:13
  • I certainly will do one of those things, once I can clean up the mess I've created for myself. – Jonathan Holvey Jan 09 '18 at 13:21
  • That's not a symbolic link though... – u1686_grawity Jan 09 '18 at 13:41
  • @grawity I see what you're getting at. After reading a little on [the subject](https://stackoverflow.com/a/29786294/3803805), I've edited my question to refer to a hard link, not symbolic. – Jonathan Holvey Jan 09 '18 at 23:09

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The simple solution was to reboot into safe mode with command prompt, and remove the files using the command line.

I also wrote a wrapper function for ln so that I can use mklink to make Windows symlinks with the command ln -s.

Jonathan Holvey
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