Mac OS counterpart to Sysinternals and Powertoys

Question

As a developer coming from a Windows background, I'd always find the different Powertoys and Sysinternals apps as invaluable tools in aiding programming. Is there something similar for a developer to watch for in the Mac world?

Answer 1

A lot of those types of tools are included with the Mac OS, and some are available separately from Apple.

There's no Mac equivalent of the registry - everything goes in the file system somewhere - and you can use fs_usage to watch that. In a terminal:

sudo fs_usage

Check out Instruments, part of the Apple developer tools distribution.

Answer 2

Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X is an article that describes ten really useful tools that are Mac equivalents of some of the Sysinternals tools such as ProcessMon, FileMon, etc.

The post's author created some of the scripts when he made the DTraceToolkit, which he says Apple then customized and enhanced for inclusion by default in Mac OS X.

Some script names look like they end with the word "noop," which might be a bit confusing--it's actually "snoop." As in spying on system activity.

Answer 3

Mac OS X comes with a lot of unix tools like sar, top, etc. What metrics are you looking for specifically?