AppAddict
December 14th, 2024

Sloth - Activity Monitor on Steroids

Mac Apps
Sloth
Sloth


Sloth is a free and open-sourced app that's been around for twenty years. It provides an app by app breakdown of all open files and sockets in use by all running processes on your system. This makes it easy to inspect which apps are using which files and sockets. In activity monitor, you get information on processes, but not on what app they belong to or where they are located on disk. Every so often, when you are troubleshooting an obscure problem, you need that information. I recently had to track down what app was causing my Mac to slow to a crawl every time I encountered an open/save dialog box. Sloth was helpful during that process.

You may end up surprised at some processes running on your box. Despite everything I have tried, the inescapable Adobe virus insists on running some process whenever my computer is on, despite having all their apps set to not run at login.

Features

  • View all open files, directories, IP sockets, devices, Unix domain sockets and pipes
  • Filter by name, access mode, volume, type, location, or using regular expressions
  • Sort by name, process ID, user ID, process type, bundle identifier, etc.
  • View IP socket status, protocol and version
  • View sockets and pipes established between processes
  • Inspection window with detailed macOS and Unix file/socket/process info
  • Powerful contextual menu for file operations
  • In-app authentication to run with root privileges

Sloth is available on GitHub and can be downloaded via Homebrew. 

$ brew install --cask sloth