Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Monitoring disk activity

Going by the popular naming convention of monitoring tools ending in the word 'top' (the command used to monitor processes), the tool to monitor disk I/O is called iotop.

Getting ready

iotop doesn't come preinstalled with most Linux distributions, you will have to install it using your package manager.

How to do it...

There are multiple ways of using iotop to perform I/O monitoring, some of which we will see in this recipe:

1. For interactive monitoring, use:

   # iotop -o
   

   The -o option to iotop tells it to show only those processes which are doing active I/O while it is running. It is a useful option to reduce the noise in the output.

2. For non-interactive use from shell scripts, use:

   # iotop -b -n 2
   

   This will tell iotop to print the ...