UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

You may still be able to access the content of the deleted file though, see this.
As others have pointed out, it's important to understand what exactly you're trying to achieve:
why you want to close the file without terminating the process?

Please present the problem and context as well as your suggested solution.
My uninformed guess is a disc space issue.

Yes methyl. File system was getting full while the file had been deleted.

Do you know what process had the file open? Any reason that you cannot just stop/start the process at a convenient time?

Presumably your disc is still full?

IMN restrospect -

Code:

cd /directory/to/bigfile/
> my bigfile.dat

If a process has the file open, it will continue to exists and grow even if you delete it.
So next time, DO NOT DELETE the file, truncate it. That is what the example code does above. This solves the disc full problem. And it allows you to truncate the file again and again. Actually I would stop the process, and do something about having it write to /dev/null since you do not care about the file contents.

It also speaks to the idea of telling us what your problem is, instead of telling us how you wanted to solve it.