A few spy tools for your operating system (other than strace)
That's indeed a useful list. lsof alone covers a lot of ground!<p>Mac OS X has a pretty nice set of DTrace scripts built in: <a href="http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scripts-for-mac-os-x/" rel="nofollow">http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scr...</a><p>The ones I use the most:<p>* iosnoop: see all disk I/O. especially useful to find disk-chatty/poll-y apps.<p>* execsnoop: see new processes being spawned.<p>* opensnoop: see file opens. especially useful for failed file opens that break an app.<p>* dtruss: see all system calls. get access to the entire OS interaction history of an process (or app).<p>* errinfo: trace failing system calls. where there is smoke...<p>* iotop -- who is using disk<p>There is just a crazy, crazy list of things available, built-in:<p><pre><code>  man -k dtrace
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Edit: wow HN formatting sucks so bad. I wish I could make that list more readable, but apparently I can't.