Can fam do this [was] vanishing fam-2.6.10-11

[Daniel Veillard]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 08:11:56AM +0100, Douglas Furlong wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-07-29 at 20:50 -0500, Harry Putnam wrote:
> > Michal,
> > 
> > I butted in here on the hunch that you or some one else might be able
> > to advise me about `fam'.  I've never knowingly used `fam' but it
> > looks like something that could report file changes.
> > 
> > Only trouble is the docu only says it reports file changes to other
> > apps.  Never mentions how one might use it to get a report in a file.
> > 
> > Can `fam' do such a thing? If so can you steer me to some howto info
> > that will help me set it up?
> > 
> > I'm interested in logging file changes in a given directory.  It
> > consisted some 2-3 thousand text files.
> > 
> > I'd hoped to script up something using fam to do the checking.
> Morning Michal
> 
> I believe fam primarily looks for new files in directories, updates in
> file details on the file system, e.g. access time, permissions etc. It
> then lets programs know.
> 
> It's more monitoring changes in the file system then changes in the
> files them selves (or at least that is my impression).
> 
> I get the feeling your looking more for some thing along the lines of
> diff, which compares new and old files. Does that sound correct?

  The FAM API is about reporting changes, but not how files changed.
It is relatively expensive on large directories unfortunately:
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124361

 I will try to reduce the CPU usage in gamin but we lack kernel support
which would make that easy.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/