FSMonitor 2 released — file system event monitoring for macOS

Do not support this app. It spreads hidden files for trial purposes which are impossible to remove once installed.

First of all I want to apologize for posting something that has been perceived as spam. While I can’t deny a marketing angle, I genuinely thought the app could be useful for this community. Lesson learned.

But I feel like I should add some context to the statement that the app “spreads” files that can’t be removed. This is not really true, it simply writes two boring old files that note the date the app was first launched (two files because the app consists of two executables). You totally can remove them if you know where they are. But of course I would prefer that users do not remove them, for obvious reasons, haha.

Basically what I want to convey is that this app implemented its demo restriction like pretty much every other shareware app since the dawn of times. :slight_smile:

But happy to answer any additional question.

Take care

Matthias

Thank you for clarifying, but I don’t see the advantage over Sloth app, which is free.

Sloth is a nice tool, but it solves a different problem.

As far as I know, Sloth shows which files are currently open by which processes, similar to what you would get from lsof. That is useful when you want to
know “who has this file open right now?”

FSMonitor listens to filesystem events instead. It records actual filesystem changes: files being created, deleted, renamed, modified, etc. So it answers a
different question: “what changed on disk, when did it happen, and which process caused it?”

For example, if a script quickly creates and deletes a few temporary files, FSMonitor should record those mutations. In Sloth, they may never appear,
because the files may not be open by the time you look.

So I see them as complementary tools rather than direct alternatives: Sloth is for open files; FSMonitor is for filesystem changes.