To All (This is mainly for the Mac DTrace 3, Adam Leventhal, Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro),
My name is Blake Sawyer and I am currently doing some research at Virginia Tech. One of the goals of this project is to track meaningful user interactions such as viewing any file, webpage, or mail document. I love developing for the Mac and knew that AppleScript would do this easily, but also knew that DTrace has been ported to the Mac. To move away from AppleScript, I started to learn DTrace. As I am fairly new to DTrace, both on the Mac and any Solaris environment, I have a few questions about DTrace's capabilities on Mac OS X. What I want to know is if DTrace _can_ do this, not _how_ to do it. I need to decide if I should spend time learning DTrace for this research project. From what I have learned from DTrace is that you can monitor the system calls of either the OS probes or individual processes. Also, on the Mac you are able to monitor Objective-C calls by specifying an individual Cocoa application. For my particular project I need to track 3 tasks: when any arbitrary application accesses a file, when any web page is accessed, and when any mail client assesses an email. My knowledge of DTrace tells me that I need to create probes for every application that can do these three types of tasks. Is there another approach that does not need to know every type of application or process that can do these 3 tasks? I appreciate any feedback one could give. Thanks in advanced, Blake _______________________________________________ dtrace-discuss mailing list dtrace-discuss@opensolaris.org
