I built a native mac app called FileWatcher. It watches the filesystem for events like read, write, open, mount, stat, etc etc. I wanted to investigate how xcode's build system worked [1] (which relies on `stat` to determine whether or not a file needs to be recompiled) and couldn't find any tool that would do the job.

I was astonished when I couldn't find what I needed - surely this had already been solved by someone else! There are things like inotify and watchman, but they don't provide process information about the events.

I haven't figured out how to distribute it quite yet because the API it uses to collect file system events isn't allowed in apps distributed on the app store. I recently made a short video demo, though[2].

[1] https://blog.codysehl.net/2023/Understanding-the-XCode-Build... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhMWXzoBWY