NAME¶
fatrace - report system wide file access events
SYNOPSIS¶
fatrace [
OPTIONS ]
DESCRIPTION¶
fatrace reports file access events from all running processes.
It does not report file access by fatrace itself, to avoid logging events caused
by writing the output into a file. It also ignores events on virtual and
kernel file systems such as sysfs, proc, and devtmpfs.
Its main purpose is to find processes which keep waking up the disk
unnecessarily and thus prevent some power saving.
By default, events are reported to stdout. This will cause some loops if you run
this tool in e. g. gnome-terminal, as this causes a disk access for every
output line. To avoid this, redirect the output into a file.
A typical event looks like
rsyslogd(875): W /var/log/auth.log
compiz(1971): O device 8:2 inode 658203
The line has the following fields:
- •
- Process name. This is read from /proc/pid/comm, and might be abbreviated
for long process names.
- •
- Process ID
- •
- Event type: Open, Read, Write, or Close.
Combinations are possible, such as CW for closing a written file.
- •
- Affected file. In some cases the path and name cannot be determined, e. g.
because it is a temporary file which is already deleted. In that case, it
prints the devices' major and minor number and the inode number. To
examine such a process in more detail, you should consider using
strace(1).
If you specify the
--timestamp option, the first field will be the
current time.
OPTIONS¶
- -c, --current-mount
- Only record events on partition/mount of current directory. Without this
option, all (real) partitions/mount points are being watched.
- -o FILE, --output=FILE
- Write events to given file instead of standard output.
- -s SECONDS, --seconds=SECONDS
- Stop after the given number of seconds.
- -t, --timestamp
- Add timestamp to events. When this option is given once, the format will
be a human readable hour:minute:second.microsecond; when given twice, the
timestamp is printed as seconds/microseconds since the epoch.
- -p PID, --ignore-pid=PID
- Ignore events for this process ID. Can be specified multiple times.
- -h , --help
- Print help and exit.
AUTHOR¶
fatrace is developed by Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@ubuntu.com>.
