Have you ever installed a piece of software and wondered exactly what files it is dropping all over your hard drive? Unlike Windows, OS X does not have a central registry file where program preferences can be stored, so if a program needs to store preferences or data between runs, it has to put that information somewhere - sometimes in a preferences file that is easily found (and easily removed if you use one of the programs mentioned in our previous article, “Remove ALL (well, most all) of unwanted programs”), but sometimes in an obscure file that the software author wants to keep hidden for one reason or another (and that usually is not deleted if you uninstall the software).
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a program that could watch your system and show you exactly what files are being installed? Or, perhaps you have a need to just monitor your Mac for a period of time to see what files are being accessed. That is where fseventer may help.
The features of fseventer are listed on their web site as follows:
- Observes filesystem changes using the same underlying API as Spotlight
- Provides a graphical representation of the file activity
- Example use could be to determine what files are changed via software installation, preferences, etc
- Requires admin access & will only work on Mac OS X 10.4+ “Tiger” and “Leopard”
Basically what this does is to show you, in a graphical format, all the file activity on your system during the time you have it enabled (clicking on the button in the upper left hand corner starts and stops tracking). If you don’t like the tree view, you can view the activity in a list format.
fseventer works best if you can quit all programs (other than the ones you are interested in) that may do file creation or modification during the monitoring period. For example, when we were testing it, one of our gabby friends sent us an instant message, and this caused a lot of extra file activity that was totally unrelated to the process we were trying to monitor (you would be amazed at how many temporary files certain programs create and/or access).
Also, in our opinion the tree view format can get totally out of hand (too much information!) if you let it run more than a few minutes (and it will automatically drop events once its internal buffer is full - the limit is set in the preferences). We with there were some way to exclude activity not associated with the processes we are actually interested in, but that would probably be difficult or impossible for the software authors to implement. Even so, this utility provides an interesting view of what’s happening on your Mac, and it is free to download (but the author does accept donations).
This is another tool that some folks will find very useful, while others will see no need for it at all. Those who prefer to use their geek tools from the command line may wish to take note of the “Related Links” at the bottom of the fseventer page.
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