ProcessMon was a great tool for windows at finding out all kinds of stuff about running processes. Getting a list of current open files and folders helped me many times. Now, for Linux, there is lsof. While I am untroubled by the command line, the sheer number of command line options for lsof is just overwhelming. So I looked at the graphical lsof, or GLSOF. Great tool but bit slow and a true pain to get running on Ubuntu. In my case I actually had to compile the official alpha version first (after patching couple source files to compile on ubuntu), install it, then compile the SVN version and install over the alpha GLSOF. So get it from SVN, svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/glsof glsof AND in the tarball, then google for patches to about.c and query_editor.c, patch, compile and install the tarball version. It will not work, but do dismay. Now, assuming not too much is broken in the dev SVN version you got, run autoconf.sh (fix configure files as needed), configure, make (fix makefiles as needed) and make install on SVN (over the existing GLSOF)… In the end you will get a good process monitoring tool and a decent FileMon replacement.