The open-file table is used to

By keeping a central open-file table, the operating system can perform the following operation that would be infeasible otherwise. Consider a file that is currently being accessed by one or more processes. If the file is deleted, then it should not be removed from the disk until all processes accessing the file have closed it. This check could be performed only if there is centralized accounting of number of processes accessing the file. On the other hand, if two processes are accessing the file, then separate state needs to be maintained to keep track of the current location of which parts of the file are being accessed by the two processes. This requires the operating system to maintain separate entries for the two processes.