29th January 2013, 1 min read

inotify-tools: inotifywait

I wanted to see what files and when J-Pilot accesses its pdb and pc3 files. In my case strace produces much more output than actually needed. But inotifywait shows what and when files are accessed.

inotifywait -m .jpilot/

inotifywait is in Debian/Ubuntu package inotify-tools.

Here is an example of the output:

.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ ACCESS DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ CLOSE_NOWRITE,CLOSE DatebookDB.pdb
.jpilot/ OPEN DatebookDB.pc3
.jpilot/ ATTRIB DatebookDB.pc3
.jpilot/ CLOSE_NOWRITE,CLOSE DatebookDB.pc3
.jpilot/ CREATE jpilot.alarms.tmp
.jpilot/ OPEN jpilot.alarms.tmp
.jpilot/ ATTRIB jpilot.alarms.tmp
.jpilot/ MODIFY jpilot.alarms.tmp
.jpilot/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE jpilot.alarms.tmp
.jpilot/ MOVED_FROM jpilot.alarms.tmp
.jpilot/ MOVED_TO jpilot.alarms
.jpilot/ MODIFY jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ OPEN jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ ATTRIB jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ MODIFY jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ MODIFY jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ OPEN jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ ATTRIB jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ MODIFY jpilot.rc
.jpilot/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE jpilot.rc