James Pearson

October 10, 2021

Terminal Hacks - View File System Usage

Do you want to know why a particular drive is not ejecting on your Mac? Is a process causing a lot of strain on your computer's processor and you want to identify what that may be? This Terminal command will show you what your Mac is currently reading and writing to disk...

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Open Terminal: Finder > Applications > Utilities

In Terminal, type or paste the following…

sudo fs_usage

(return) (enter Mac password) (return)

A dynamic list of all the processes that are actively reading and writing to the Mac's disk will be displayed as a live stream.

::TIP:: If you see a ktrace_start: Resource busy warning in Terminal then you will have to restart the Mac and run the terminal command again for it to work. This issue may occur if you run the command a second time before the Mac has been rebooted.