> LSOF lists open files so the file cannot be deleted because it is open. > > It has been marked for deletion and will be deleted by the Operating System when it is closed. On unix systems you can certainly unlink files while they're open - any processes which have an open file descriptor can still read/write the data and technically it's still on disk, but it's gone from the filesystem and cannot be opened any longer. I'm almost certain you know this Keith, so I'm not sure why you're being so unnecessarily difficult here. Commonly we refer to such files as "deleted," which is coincidentally the same nomenclature lsof uses to flag file descriptors referring to inodes which are no longer reachable via the filesystem.