Every Mac needs to interact with a drive, be it a traditional mechanical hard drive, once of these fancy new SSD (Solid State Drive) devices, or even a network drive, often referred to as NAS (Network Attached Storage). Sure, you can use Activity Monitor and its Disk Activity tab, or a utility like iStat Menus to view disk activity. But what if you want more specific information? Enter fseventer.
fseventer is a utility that will show you exactly what files are being created, changed, and destroyed on your drive. How does it do this? Via a service in Mac OS X called File System Events, or fsevents for short. Rather than scour you entire hard drive to look for changes, fsevents will send a notification when something changes on your drive. Fseventer will display these changes in one of two ways.
Fseventer Graphical View
The first is a graphical view of your drive. The root, or top level, of your drive is shown on the left, and specific directories are shown moving to the right. Hovering your cursor over an item will show the type of event, how long ago it occurred, and other information, such as the process that caused the change. The other view is a list view, which will show the path, time, type of event, process, and an EUID, if applicable. Additional options include a file inspector, a print option, flagging an even, filtering events, and clearing the events shown.
Fseventer List View
So get a better idea of what is happening to your drive, and check out fseventer today? Have any other gadgets that let you know what your Mac is doing? Send an email to John, and he’ll give it a look.