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Tuesday, June 21st, 2005

Real-time file usage info in OS X

Jonathan Rentzsch describes the details on how to use the command line tool fs_usage to discover what files a program is opening, reading, writing, saving, and so on. This could be is quite useful for figuring out where a program is storing information or what might be going wrong with a mis-behaving app.

Update:

For example, the following shows filesystem activity for Safari (-w forces a wide detailed output and -f filesys shows only file system related output instead of including network related output too).

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys Safari

See also:

  • sc_usage (system call usage statistics)
  • latency (monitors scheduling and interrupt latency)
  • vm_stat (virtural memory statistics)

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