If you are debugging issues in your application, in the areas mentioned above, then I suggest you give these invaluable tools a try. Microsoft had acquired company behind these tools and made available for download at the link above. These free tools have existed in developers tool-belt for decades. You can only go so far with the in-built Task Manager. On Windows platform, there are times when one has to troubleshoot problems related to file access, registry access, locks, CPU usage, memory usage etc. It would also be nice if it did not require administrative privileges.Sysinternals Tools - Process Explorer and Process Monitor Another requirement which I didn't really state is that speed is fairly important I was planning on doing this for things like compiling a C++-file, and pulling up a full GUI which generates a 20 MB logfile will have prohibitive overhead.

I'm really only interested in what files are opened, and if they are opened for read/write or just read. If I narrow down my requirements even further, it is probably enough to be able to monitor calls to CreateFile(). I'm aware of Process Monitor, but I would like to receive the data in a form which I can import into another program for further analysis. I want to do this programmatically from another process. I'm primarily interested in running a process and figuring out which files it has read and written.

On Linux I can probably get away using strace with suitable parameters, but how can I do this on Windows? I would like to be able to monitor certain system calls made by a process, primarily file I/O calls.

Windows sysinternals process monitor