View Filesystem Access in Real Time on Mac OS X

Had a sysinternals tool (filemon) for that, but now I can find something similar for the mac.

I'm a developer and I basically want to debug "file not found" or "wrong permissions" errors.

Tanja Allito

Posted 2010-01-19T22:16:15.967

Reputation:

Answers

You can use lsof or fs_usage in Terminal. lsof can be quite powerful. If it's about a specific process, you can try sampling it in Activity Monitor.

For a GUI tool, my recommendation is fseventer:

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More GUI-oriented utilities, which I haven't used:

FileMon

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FS Spy

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phoebus

Posted 2010-01-19T22:16:15.967

Reputation: 3 811

fseventer claims "10.10 Yosemite is classified as unsupported till further notice". is there an updated answer? are there new recommendations? – rafraf – 2015-07-14T09:55:56.030

+1 very nice answer. Btw, I've just tried FileMon and the filtering doesn't seem to work, which makes it pretty useless. fseventer is very nice. – occulus – 2013-02-27T10:59:28.750

For viewing what files are accessed in real time you can leverage fs_usage part of the FSEvents feature in Mac OS X or even dtrace itself.

Usage: sudo fs_usage [PID].

For more info, check out the man page

Chealion

Posted 2010-01-19T22:16:15.967

Reputation: 22 932

fs_usage is my favorite. I wrote about it on my blog post @ http://mohit.io/blog/fs_usage-trace-file-system-calls-on-mac-os-x/ where I was stuck with Outlook that had hung and I wanted to know what it was doing on my Mac.

– mohit – 2015-03-20T19:00:32.583