how to tell which process is accessing my disk?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 08:39:17PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> i have a vague feeling i've sent this query out before, but i can't find
> a record of it.  is there a tool that lets me see what process is
> accessing the disk?  i just had a half-hour period where i couldn't use
> my computer at ll because trackerd was monopolizing the disk.  i'd like
> to be able to fire up a command-line tool that will tell me what's going
> on in such cases.  

# apt-cache show iotop
Package: iotop
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 88
Maintainer: Paul Wise <pabs-8fiUuRrzOP0dnm+yROfE0A at public.gmane.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.2-2
Depends: python (>= 2.5), python-support (>= 0.7.1)
Filename: pool/main/i/iotop/iotop_0.2-2_all.deb
Size: 12658
MD5sum: c6858d7ae3ee179b26d509118951e457
SHA1: 17c806efab5b9aedf791e8decd36b933a41ce362
SHA256: 801c113b0166d6518e67dba2c4aab14ea0a9274097e90e7c1f9ca26e43d3edb5
Description: simple top-like I/O monitor
 iotop does for I/O usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It watches I/O
 usage information output by the Linux kernel (requires 2.6.20 or later)
 and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system.
 Handy for answering the question "Why is my disk churning so much?".
Homepage: http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/
Tag: admin::monitoring

-- 
Len Sorensen
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