How do I log file system read/writes by filename in Linux?

Posted by Casey on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Casey
Published on 2010-12-29T01:26:34Z Indexed on 2013/11/06 21:58 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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logging

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filesystems

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disk-monitoring

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file-monitoring

I'm looking for a simple method that will log file system operations. It should display the name of the file being accessed or modified.

I'm familiar with powertop, and it appears this works to an extent, in so much that it show the user files that were written to. Is there any other utilities that support this feature.

Some of my findings:

powertop: best for write access logging, but more focused on CPU activity
iotop: shows real time disk access by process, but not file name
lsof: shows the open files per process, but not real time file access
iostat: shows the real time I/O performance of disk/arrays but does not indicate file or process

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