This is also a cause of frequent confusion among less knowledgeable users when they try to clear up space on a filesystem that is reporting full, but there is a process keeping the file desciptor open. As far as they can tell the file is gone, but the usage hasn't gone down. There is a guy at my work that I point out lsof +L1 to about every three months or so. He can't seem to wrap his head around the concept.