Profiling file accesses to pare down filesystem

[Jon Ringle]

David Wuertele wrote:
> Not strictly a cross-compling issue, but since there are so 
> many embedded gurus here I thought I'd give it a try:
> 
> Normally I build embedded root filesystems up from scratch 
> including only files that are needed by the applications, but 
> in my present situation I've inherited a very large 
> pre-existing filesystem to which many people have contributed 
> thousands and thousands of files.  I need to eliminate the 
> cruft to make it smaller.
> 
> I would like to automatically generate a list of files 
> accessed by the product's applications.  I figure there must 
> be some software out there for logging this info straight out 
> of the Linux kernel.  I could use strace, but I'm looking for 
> something more automatic that I can start at boot and harvest 
> after a simulated lifecycle of the product.
> 
> Any suggestions?

I've never tried this, so I don't know if it would actually work, but
perhaps you could leverage
'find / -atime' using a timestamp when the system was booted?

Jon

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