Snoop is freeware that started life as a debugging utility but has taken on a personality that reflects its name. It will continually watch the specified process and display the following pieces of information:
• the name of the process as it is appears in the systems process list
• the creator and type of the process
• the parent of the process, if launched by the Finder there is no parent
• the processes starting memory address
• the processes partition size including the overhead added by the system
• the total, not contiguous, amount of free space left in the applications heap
• the processes SIZE flags that we all know and love
• and I couldn't let it go without the obligatory clock
To use Snoop, simply drop it in the Control Panels folder and restart. It defaults to watching the front process (the one whose menu is active). You can select which of the currently executing processes to watch by choosing the process from the popup menu. If the ‘Sticky Snoop’ box is checked, an ‘Other…’ item is added to the popup to allow you to select processes from disk to watch. In this case Snoop will wait until that process begins execution to display any information (it will tell you what process it’s waiting on). For those who live in the base16 world, you can change the display of the partition starting address, the partition size, and the free heap space to hex.
You can customize the startup message displayed by editing the ‘STR ‘ resource.
A quick reference and SIZE legend can be had thru the control panel by clicking on the dogs,
Snoop requires System 7.0 or later to run. It will scarf up 12 pixels from your vertical workspace.
Known Anomalies
• Snoop will crash some CPUs when using the internal 24-bit video.
• Now Softwares Startup Manager. This is not a fatal problem, just aesthetic. If Snoop is set to load anywhere but last the placement of icons during init loading will appear more to be a stairway than a horizontal path.
• QuickDraw GX. GX coordinates are thrown off by the amount of screen I’ve stolen. Things work, they just aren’t real pretty. I’m working on this one.
• SuperCard and HyperCard. Same problem as QuickDraw GX.