OS x trace utilities

Skype is spying us: the proof in this Interresting post (in french) explaining how to track system calls under linux made by a specific program.

Instructions use strace command (which can be replaced by ktrace -p process_id under os x).

In case you use ktrace, you may use kdump to parse the resulting log file.

To stop ktrace, either kill the attached process or use ktrace -C to stop all traces.

Disable spotlight indexing on a external drive (Tiger)

I do not want Mac OSX to index my backup drive (FAT32), so I just added a .metadata_never_index file at the top level directory of the volume.

original article on macosxhints