How can I detect file accesses in Linux?

Question

I have a bunch of flows and data processing applications that I occasionally need to spy on, meaning I need to know what files they read. This is mostly to aid in packaging

Answer 1

man strace 

example (assume 2343 is the process id):

# logging part
strace -p 2343 -ff -o strace_log.txt 

# displaying part
grep ^open strace_log.txt