Thanks! Great for investigating!

[porg]

👍 Thanks for this cool software!

Super practical

• Being a macOS Unix/Terminal user for 20 years now, and now working with Linux too, it's the closest to macOS fs_usage I found.
• With this tool you very quickly find out which process so far unknown to you is causing what file activity so far unknown to you in no time.
• All the other Linux tools regarding "file system monitoring" presented on various blogs, forums, etc were not useful for my purposes because they either let you monitor a particular process or a particular directory/file or are disk centric. But none of them let you "investigate the unknown" in a quick and real time manner.
• Thanks!

I recommended your software on StackExchange and in some other places.

[porg]

After using it intensively the last 1-2 days I now compiled various proposals:

• --timestamp customization (format string like in UNIX date or GNU date) #13
• -P, --process-only to display process name without the PID in brackets #14
• -u, --user to show username of file event in output #16
• --columns to display customized column order and column widths #15
• Event type letter(s): Please make this a padded fixed-width format #17
• --scope in addition to --current-mount #18

And reported these bugs

• open_by_handle_at: Value too large for defined data type -- On 32-bit system when files >2GB get accessed #19
• Shows no file activity when reading/writing to HDD from Shell #20
• Access to HDD shows fine, but access to rootfs (on SDcard / ramdisk) shows open_by_handle_at: Too many levels of symbolic links #21

Hope this helps!

[martinpitt]

Cheers, glad to hear! Thanks for the detailed issues, I'll respond there one by one.

[porg]

What's the proper Linux way to position that custom build until the repro receives the updates?

• In terms of location for binary plus man/helper files and $PATH or alias config?
  • So that I can call it with fatrace both as root and normal users and it overrules the normal location.
  • So which fatracepoints to the custom build.
  • Or alternatively being available as fatrace-nightly to all users.

[martinpitt]

I recommend putting self-built binaries into /usr/local/bin/, that will have the properties you desire. That won't affect the manpage of course (but that doesn't change for bug fixes anyway). fatrace has no helper binaries.