I looked over at my Process X-Ray window today and saw a program that I hadn’t heard about before - ditto

Process X-Ray main window, “ditto” selected

So I typed “man ditto” in the Mac Terminal:

Then my attention deficit disorder got the better of me when I saw a lot of commands fly up on the Process X-Ray window. I got curious about what the “man” program did, so I looked into its details.

Process X-Ray main window, “man” selected

The next figure shows the details of the two processes. The process on the left was created by the bash shell when I initially typed the command “man ditto”. It appears that the “man” program mainly identifies the relevant document (ditto.1) on the file system and then creates a sequence of UNIX programs to process and present the contents of that document. This is seen in the details window on the right. The red line shows the document file that is processed by the sequence of commands.

Process X-Ray’s details window for processes 32611 and 32612

By the way, if you look at the Process X-Ray main window for the “man” command, you will also see “G2MUpdate” was executed. This is that hidden LogMeIn agent that keeps running even after I deleted the application. See Looking for Command & Control agents on my Mac for details on that.

Upcoming Beta

I plan to post a Beta of Process X-Ray in about 2 weeks, and if all goes well, make it available for free after that. Let me know if you want to Beta test Process X-Ray on a Mac (Catalina).