Hi All,

This is my first post. I've got a Ubuntu 12.04 server hosted on Amazon EC2. This server is acting as a simple file server. I have set up Apache to serve out WebDAV folders using Apache's davfs module. The WebDAV folder is secured over SSL port 443. The authentication method is digest. I set up everything by the book and this is a standard deployment of webdav.

The problem is that now I have users connecting to this drive who are running Windows and Microsoft Office. Usually Office programs like Word and Excel when opened create a temporary lock file in the same directory. For example if Test.docx is opened, then a file called ~$Test.docx is created. Now when the original file is closed in Office, this temporary file is automatically removed also. However, with us, these files remain behind for some reason leading to confusion and clutter.

Does anybody know what I can do to solve this problem please?

Thanks very much!

Ran into this same issue with open office, only way I found around it was to disable that feature inside the application.

Thanks for your reply Kustom42. I did some googling on this but it seems that in Microsoft Office applications, you can't turn the temporary files off because they contain some edits information too. The only solution I can think of is to do a scheduled cron job that deletes any files starting with ~$. But ideally I want to find out why this is happening. Is it just the case that MS Office isn't 100% compatible with WebDAV?

WebDAV is something Microsoft had to do, I've never really seen much effort from thier part as far as support. I used to run into WebDAV issues atleast once a week when working at a hosting provider, especially for the replacement of frontpage exts.


Anyways, if you are going to go the cron route make sure to do an fuser or lsof or similar to make sure there is no existing file lock on the file that way you won't get your script error'ing out if someone is using office and working on that file