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fseventer
What really happens when you install a new piece of software on your Mac? What files does it look at, what files does it modify?
How about running apps? What are they really up to behind your back?
Fseventer displays a graphical view of real-time file system activity:
To accomplish this, it piggybacks on the same event notifier Spotlight uses. There is a command line tool that does basically the same thing available from http://www.kernelthread.com/software/fslogger/. Both warn you that Apple could change this interface at any time, but for the moment, it's still there.
Inexpensive and informative Apple related e-books:
Font Problems in Leopard
Take Control of your iPad
Permissions in Tiger (Leopard version also available)
Troubleshooting Your Mac
Permissions in Leopard
The red entries are files or directories that you (the user running fseventer) don't have access to or no longer exist. If you mouse over any element, fseventer wil show you what happened: Content Modified, Deleted, Renamed, etc. It will also tell you the application or process id that was responsible.
The command line tool wasn't compiled as a Universal binary, so I was unable to test it on my Intel Mac. There's also an open source gfslogger but I couldn't reach that site to download source.
Technorati tags: Mac+OS+X
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