Sys Admin's Daily Grind: lsof

The Long and the Short of It: lsof

Article from Issue 124/2011
Author(s):

The shorter a command, the longer the list of support parameters. This rule applies to lsof, one of Charly’s favorite commands.

If you type lsof without parameters, the output is a long list of open files. This outpouring is sorted by PID; thus, it starts with init. On a laptop I was using as a lab machine, the list includes no fewer than 6,778 entries, which is not my understanding of intelligible.

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