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I think your post is actually more useful than the article.

Excellent! I think I know Unix pretty well, but it would be great if someone had a directory of common use scenarios that one could look through, rather than using Google and wading through horrible forum posts...

Not completely sure what you're asking for, here, but Command Line Fu might be in the ball park:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

You don't have to use lsof for that. Just find the pid of the process that has it open, then cd /proc/<pid>/fd and then ls -l

lsof doesn't really do anything for you if you know the pid already. (But it's great if you don't know the pid.)

Then, look through the list for your file, and copy the file descriptor just like in the article.

This is true, but only in the kinda trivial sense that lsof is just a pretty front end to the /proc filesystem. The same is true of pmap and netstat, but they remain useful tools nonetheless.

lsof predates the proc filesystem if I recall correctly

Indeed. lsof is available on OS X too, which doesn't have /proc.

doesn't seem like that's possible in OS X due to no /proc natively. I'm going to see if I can do it with MacFUSE & procfs..