fseventer

Ways to monitor hard-drive activity and usage in OS X

Every now and then it can be useful to track how a program or process is accessing the hard drive. There are times when troubleshooting when you may want to track what files get changed when application settings are adjusted, or which files are accessed when you load a particular feature. Apple provides the Activity Monitor utility that will show you the overall input and output rates of the hard drive, but this overview does not specify the files that are being accessed.

While there are numerous ways to monitor hard-drive activity and usage in OS X, I've found … Read more

Weekly troubleshooting utilities update

Our weekly utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though utilities can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems.

This week we have updates for fsevents-based file-system managing utilities, graphics and system managing hardware utilities, a few network diagnostics and information utilities, and one system maintenance program.

File-system utilities Yesterday, I outlined some of the benefits of using fsevents utilities … Read more

Track file changes with fseventer and DaemonFS

There are many times when in troubleshooting your Mac, it is useful to see what files on the system are being modified. For instance, if you are having difficulty with some system preferences and know what preference files are being used to store the system settings, you can further troubleshoot the problem by manually editing the files or removing them. The problem with doing this is that sometimes you can't easily find the files that are being modified.

Though you can use the Finder to search for and sort files by modification date, this is only useful for visible … Read more