Only files opened by the specified PID are listed using the lsof command with the -p option.
The -p option entirely ignores files generated by a thread with a TID. When we grep for a specific PID, it lists all the lines where the PID is located while considering the files opened by a thread.
The files created by a thread are listed with all files opened with a PID equal to the supplied PID when awk is used in conjunction with the lsof command. This explains why using the lsof -p command results in fewer processes.
List files on a CentOS Linux server using the -p option and the lsof command as below.
# lsof -p 1530 | wc -l 238
On the same machine, grep/awk yields the results below.
# lsof | grep -i 1530 | wc -l 2180 # lsof | awk '$2 == 1530'|wc -l 213
In the output of the lsof -p command, we do not observe a TID column, as shown below.
# lsof -p 1530 | head -3 COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME sublime_t 1530 test cwd DIR 253,1 4096 2 / sublime_t 1530 test rtd DIR 253,1 4096 2 /
