I recently encountered a problem with this because Windows doesn't allow files to be deleted when there's open handles to them. Other files opened by leveldb are not affected because by and large they are using CreateFileA, which does not allow inheritance when lpSecurityAttributes is null (ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/nf-fileapi-createfilea) However, fopen() _does_ allow inheritance, and it needs to be expressly disabled. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/fopen-wfopen?view=msvc-160main