# Which process access the disk?



## honk (Dec 19, 2009)

Is there a way to find out (or monitor) which processes are accessing a disk? I'm aware of `iostat` , but it shows the access to the disk as throughput only.

One of my systems is suffering from periodic IO every 3-8 seconds and I want to find out the culprit. Syslog is configured to remote logging only and now I want to know what I forgot = means finding the process-id.

Thanks a lot in advance!
cheers,
honk


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 19, 2009)

fstat(1) may help.


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## phoenix (Dec 20, 2009)

There's also the I/O mode for top().  Just press "*m*" to switch modes.


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## vivek (Dec 21, 2009)

lsof (not installed by default) can dig out lot more than disk, dir and process names. You will not disappointed.


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