unitop

[strizhechenko]

Basic top-like utility that watches any given file without knowning it content before.
No prettytables/etc, just unitop --file=/proc/net/netstat and enjoy calculated difference in output.

[himanshub16]

Hi @strizhechenko. I would like to work on this.
Here is possible approach I would go for.

• Making a temporary copy of the file (in /tmp).
• Monitor the file using either inotify or polling (for polling, monitoring change in stat system call, from os.stat)
• For every change, show the diff.

This can be implemented using shell script, with dependency on inotify-tools as diff and stat are already available.
It would however, not work for large files as copy and then diff would be slow.

[strizhechenko]

Hi, @himanshub16! I would appreciate you help, but I want to comment your ideas before you start.

• it's better to avoid tmp-file usage. Instead you'd better just read it into memory, files usually aren't so big.
• about inotify - I don't really know if it works well with files in /sys and /proc file systems.
• if you mean just run diff -u origin_file /tmp/copy_file it's not the thing I really want to have in unitop output. For better example you can look at irqtop utility that works with /proc/interrupts file:

It shows evaluated delta between previous and current values.

Also look at basetop.py, there's already done many thing that unitop needs and it's much better to start build unitop on top of basetop (lol, it sounds like tongue-twister). It's better to just implement an:

class UniTop(BaseTop):

and 3 abstract methods and maybe override 1-2 methods from basetop like it's done in irqtop