The following is a demonstration of the fddist command, Here fddist is run for a few seconds on an idle workstation, Tracing reads and writes... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C EXEC: dtrace PID: 3288 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 0 | 0 1 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 2 2 | 0 EXEC: mozilla-bin PID: 1659 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 3 | 0 4 |@@@@@@@@@@ 28 5 | 0 6 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 40 7 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 40 8 | 0 EXEC: Xorg PID: 1532 value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 22 | 0 23 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 57 24 | 0 The above displays the usage pattern for process file descriptors. We can see the Xorg process (PID 1532) has made 57 reads or writes to it's file descriptor 23. The pfiles(1) command can be used to help determine what file descriptor 23 actually is.