real-time filesystem monitoring

real-time filesystem monitoring

[Ognen Duzlevski]

Hi,

I am working on a GPL-ed tool to monitor a filesystem in real time and
then perform a backup as soon as something has changed. In that direction
I tried FAM/libfam and dnotify and both choked on large directory
hierarchies. dnotify seems to require open file descriptors so it is not a
good solution unless one is to carefully control the number of the file
descriptors open and perform (sometimes large and slow) directory
re-reads every time there is some change (whose nature dnotify will not
report). I wanted to also port the code to Windows and provide a free
solution for its users and it turns out implementing such a solution on
Windows is much easier - there is a function called ReadDirectoryChangesW
which will notify an application every time there is a filesystem-wide
change and provide all information about this change. Anything similar on
Linux?

Thank you,
Ognen

Re: real-time filesystem monitoring

[Jan Kokoska]

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 15:19, Ognen Duzlevski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am working on a GPL-ed tool to monitor a filesystem in real time and
> -

Hello,

You can have a look how this has been done elsewhere:

http://www.bangstate.com/changedfiles/

I have tested this here and it works nicely, but you should expect a
higher system load using the userspace daemon for handling file-access
notification actions.

--
 
Jan Kokoska

Re: real-time filesystem monitoring

[Esben Stien]

Ognen Duzlevski <maketo@sdf.lonestar.org> writes:

> I am working on a GPL-ed tool to monitor a filesystem in real time and
> then perform a backup as soon as something has changed. 

Yeah, been waiting a long time for this

> I tried FAM/libfam and dnotify and both choked on large directory
> hierarchies. 

Yeah, I first checked this out too. 

> Anything similar on
> Linux?

Filemon, http://www.sysinternals.com, runs on both gnu and windows but
is not free software. 

-- 
b0ef