Log every access to a file

[Chris Pressey]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:00:15 +0000
Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 01:07:26AM -0800, andi payn wrote:
> 
> > The second is to use fam. I should mention that I've only used fam under
> > linux, and, after a brief glance, it looks like the FreeBSD port
> > (/usr/ports/devel/fam) is not as powerful--in particular, FreeBSD
> > apparently doesn't provide imon support (a way for the filesystem to
> > make a callback to a usermode app like fam--no dnotify or anything
> > similar, either, apparently). Which implies that it's probably just a
> > heavier-weight way of doing the exact same thing--periodically stat'ing
> > a list of files--and that there is no better solution available.
> 
> Check the kevent(2) man page.  It's a generic mechanism for having the
> kernel message your process when some condition occurs, such as
> modification of a file.  Unfortunately other than knowing something
> happened, it doesn't tell you a great deal else, like who it was that
> made the alteration.

And for a way to easily use this facility from shell scripts, check out
sysutils/wait_on, in the ports tree.

-Chris