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Jim
Asked: 2013-02-23 00:59:30 +0800 CST

Detect file update from modification time

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Is there a way to see how often a file is being updated?
I mean I need to see if the modification time of a file is updated in a dynamic way (same as tail shows if the file is updated in a dynamic way).
I can not use e.g. tail since the contents of the file are not appended, but overwritten and could be overwriten with the same value so I can not make a concusion.

linux

3 Answers

  1. How about this:

    watch -n 1 'stat /path/to/the/file'
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  2. You can use inotifywait to do this much more efficiently for example

    inotifywait -e modify -m  --timefmt "%F %T" --format "%T %e" /tmp/fred/1

    Will watch the file /tmp/fred/1 for modify events so updading it produces output like

    2013-02-22 09:30:26 MODIFY
2013-02-22 09:30:26 MODIFY

    You can log multiple events, change the time format (the timefmt takes strftime formatting) output to a file and daemonize e.g

    inotifywait -o /tmp/watch.out -d -e modify -m  --timefmt "%F %T" --format "%T %e" /tmp/fred/1

    so now you can just tail /tmp/watch.out.

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  3. You can also use 'audit' daemon /etc/audit/auditd.conf is configuration file for audit daemon /etc/audit/audit.rules contains audit rules

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