I'm the author of the post -- that's good to know, thanks! :) I know embarrassingly little about filesystems. I'm glad you pointed this out.
EDIT: though, I'd point out that if you really wanted to recover the file you should probably try to use /proc or something (at the time I didn't know about this). This approach requires crawling the disk which is obv pretty slow. :) It's less of a "here's a useful thing" and more of an excited "HEY DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN DO X".
EDIT 2: I updated the blog to link to your comment, because it's baller.
If processes which hold your file open are still running, then you can access the file via the /proc/<pid>/fd/ entries. Run an 'ls -l' in the proc directory of the process to see those.
You can simply copy the (proc) file to a new location to recover it.
Remember: open files keep the contents present on disk until the controlling process exists or closes the filehandle.
Since you're actually accessing the file on disk your issues of storage contingency don't come into play -- it's all read back to you in proper file order.
But yes, files (and virtual files) on Linux are pretty slick.
I also remember being really excited learning about disk image files and the ways in which they can be manipulated. Including the options of creating filesystems on virtual disks, partitioning them, and them mounting those partitions, etc. First tried with bootable floppy distros, but I've played around with them in a bunch of contexts since.
EDIT: though, I'd point out that if you really wanted to recover the file you should probably try to use /proc or something (at the time I didn't know about this). This approach requires crawling the disk which is obv pretty slow. :) It's less of a "here's a useful thing" and more of an excited "HEY DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN DO X".
EDIT 2: I updated the blog to link to your comment, because it's baller.