

Ask HN: Tool that lets you identify changes an app makes to the disk? - jfdi

Similar to using the time command ($ time &#60;app&#62;) in a shell to see duration of execution, I wondered if there's something that will be similarly executed and give you a read-out of the changes an app makes to disk.
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erikig
Here are some suggestions:

If you are on *nix you can list all the files that a process is using: $ lsof
-p <PID>,<PID>,<PID>

Then do a diff of the listed files against older versions of the files (e.g
from a backup).

On Windows you can use procmon.exe (its a free tool from Microsoft that lists
all network, registry and files) and see the updates in realtime.

Hope those work.

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jfdi
Thanks guys this is a great starting point. I'll try each out and see how what
works best. If I discover anything interesting I'll put a blog post up
outlining in case others run into the same.

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dantheta
strace can do it (Linux). Watch out for "open", "read","write","unlink" in the
output - these are some of the filesystem operations.

inotifywatch (from inotify-tools) can show you changes made to files in a
particular directory.

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wmf
DTrace?

