What program can show what processes write what files on which disk?

Shajirr · 02-24-2020, 09:37 AM

What program can show what processes write/read what files on which disk?

Basically need an equivalent of this - shows process name, PID, file name, read/write amount

iotop shows which processes, doesn't show which files or on which disk are being written/read.

KSysGuard - same story, doesn't show what is being read/written and where.

michaelk · 02-24-2020, 10:42 AM

Have a look at the lsof command.

FlinchX · 02-29-2020, 10:54 PM

An alternative to lsof would be the fuser command

syg00 · 02-29-2020, 11:54 PM

Basically the problem is that *nix doesn't maintain those kind of stats anywhere. The I/O system is abstracted via the VFS so the kernel only gets pointers to buffers essentially.
It is possible to get that data with kernel traces, but they are not trivial to implement. Also the data are only valid from the time of the trace being initiated, not necessarily from the time any particular process started. And of course there is a limit to the kernel cache you can use.

pan64 · 03-01-2020, 04:35 AM

Why do you need that? What do you want to achieve? lsof works. You can use for example htop/sar to see the load on a system.