Sampling with a delay

MacOS terminal is a useful tool to know for a few really handy things.

One is getting a sample of a process after some delay so you can start doing whatever it is you want to sample.

Trying to do this in Activity monitor is not possible

But at the command line you can delay the start of the sample so you have a chance to set up the sampling and then switch back to Xojo to do the task you want sampled.

So how ?

Open Terminal

Once there enter

sleep 5; sample Xojo  -file ~/Desktop/Sample2019r1.1macOS12.6.txt

The number after SLEEP is how many seconds to wait before starting to sample

The SAMPLE command takes several parameters. We’ve told it to look at any process containing “XOJO” and to put the output file on our desktop with a specific name.

This handy bit of bash makes it easy to sample something to send to Xojo as part of a bug report.