DISCUSSION: See Open Files

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See Open Files

Tech Support Written by Jeremy Garcia Sunday, 15 January 2006 One of the unique things about Unix and Linux is that everything is a file. Of course, there are many different kinds of files, including regular files, directory files, and device files. Even interprocess communication mechanisms, such as pipes and semaphores, are files. Because everything is a file, a running system has a very large number of open files at any given point in time. What if you want to know what files are open, what files a specific process has open, what files on a specific device are open, or what files a specific user has open? Enter List Open Files, or lsof, which can do this and more. lsof was written by Victor Abell and is available from http://people.freebsd.org/~abe/. You can also install lsof on Debian with the quick apt-get install lsof.

If you want to get under the hood and tinker with this stuff yourself as a programmer, try this at the command prompt:

ls -l /proc/$$/fd

and start exploring from there.