The man page for lsof gives the following description for the DEL FD:
DEL: for a Linux map file that has been deleted;
The answer in below article seems to suggest that the file in the NAME column of the lsof output has been accessed by the process but has since been deleted (and may still be resident in memory):
lsof FD column equal to DEL, what does it mean?
The description of the DEL FD provided in the above answer suggests that something in the maps file does not exist as opposed to the actual file itself? I don't know much about process map files but from what I can gather they contain virtual memory address information.
I can see many files with the DEL FD in the lsof output on a server here now and the file in the NAME column still exists on the filesystem.
So the clarification I am looking for here is what exactly has been deleted? Is this just a virtual memory allocation defined in the maps file where the target data no longer exists in virtual memory?
Any clarification on this would be greatly appreciated!
