Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting the list of open files


We know that there can be millions of files available in a system, which can be binary files, text files, directories, and so on. When a file is not in use, they are just available on a storage device as 0 and 1. To view or process a file, it needs to be opened. An application that is executing may open multiple files. Knowing what files are opened by a running application is very useful. To know the list of opened files, the lsof command is used.

Executing the following command gives the list of all opened files:

$ lsof

This gives a huge output of all the opened files.

Knowing the files opened by a specific application

To know the list of files opened by a specific application, first get the Process ID (PID) of the running application:

$ pidof application_name

For example, let's run cat without any parameter:

$ cat

In another terminal, run the following commands:

$ pidof cat
15913
$ lsof -p 15913

Alternatively, we can directly write the following command:

$ lsof...