Question

Is there a way to find out which process wrote to a give file earlier. I am having a problem where multiple processes seem to be writing to a file. I know one of the processes but not sure who else is writing to the file. I am on linux/ubuntu. Is there a way a log is mantained by the OS on what processes have written to a specified file

Answer 1

Create a small monitoring process which will log periodically who is currently accessing the file.

You can write a small script using fuser. Is here a quick example (to be improved)

#!/bin/bash

log=~/file-access.log

while true
do
  fuser your_file >> $log
  sleep 0.2s
done

But you will have to be lucky that the process writing to this file takes enough time to have the chance to detect it with fuser.