Hunting down a process
 

Hi! I'm running ubuntu linux (hoary 5.04) on a hp laptop.
Works fine everything, feels cosy. For about two weeks, there is a little harddisk activity every five to ten seconds. Just a short access to the disk, a flicker in the LED. This happens all the time, even if the system idles. "What is this?", I started to ask myself.
My questions are:
Does anyone know which process can cause this stupid repeated disk access?
Does anyone know, how to switch it off?
Can anyone tell me, how to log for example every harddisk access to trace this problem to the causing thread or to trace it by another method?
Thanks for your help. The Problem doesen't seem to be big, but i want to be sure that there is no security relevant background (Something scanning my drive?)
Thank you,
qdx

do a top command. this will show you what tasks are running and the cpu/ram utilization. you can also do a ps -A or pstree which will show you much the same. the good thing about pstree is that it shows you which jobs are dependent on other jobs. To kill a jop, do a kill <process_number>