What do GDIR, GREG, VDIR, VREG mean in lsof output

Question

The lsof manpage says the following about the TYPE column.

TYPE is the type of the node associated with the file - e.g., GDIR, GREG, VDIR, VREG, etc.

Can someone please explain (or point me to a link which explains) what these mean. I have tried googling on these but all the links take me to the lsof man page only.

If you find a link, do tell me how you googled it :)

Answer 1

Types starting with V are virtual types. That is, there is no corresponding inode on any physical disk but only a vnode in a virtual filesystem (like /proc). It seems those types only belong to BSD-like systems (AIX, Darwin, FreeBSD, HPUX, Sun etc.) and won't occur on a Linux system. As with the non-virtual types, DIR stands for directory and REG for a regular file.

I couldn't find the meaning of GDIR and GREG as they even don't appear in the lsof source code. But I guess they just stand for the non-virtual (generic?) directories and files.