Track file usage

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 09:39:09PM +0200, Andy Pieters wrote:
> Those of you who have had the punishment of maintaining workstations with m$ 
> on it might have heard, or even used filemon (from sysinternals).  It hooks 
> itself on the kernel and keeps an eye on what application accesses what file.

Depends on what you want to do. If you want to trigger something when a
specific file is accessed, look at 'fam'.

> Is anyone aware of such an utlity for Linux?  No fancy gui needed, plain old 
> cli will suffice.
> Basically what I want to do is launch the app, then run another program and 
> see what files are being opened by that program.

For this, the normal approach is to use 'strace', and look for system calls
to access files.

If you want to trace all accesses of all applications to arbitrary files,
you can do that too, but let's start with seeing if the above helps. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 80 degrees Fahrenheit.