How to trace per-file IO operations in Linux?

linux file-io filesystems trace strace
Noah Watkins picture Noah Watkins · Mar 8, 2012 · Viewed 30.3k times · Source

I need to track read system calls for specific files, and I'm currently doing this by parsing the output of strace. Since read operates on file descriptors I have to keep track of the current mapping between fd and path. Additionally, seek has to be monitored to keep the current position up-to-date in the trace.

Is there a better way to get per-application, per-file-path IO traces in Linux?

Answer

user1055604 picture user1055604 · Mar 8, 2012

You could wait for the files to be opened so you can learn the fd and attach strace after the process launch like this:

strace -p pid -e trace=file -e read=fd

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