What is filewatcher?

filewatcher is a system administration tool designed to archive changes to important system files (or any interesting file) and to send detailed reports about changes to one or more e-mail addresses when they are detected.

filewatcher is of great use in multiple administrator environments where each administrator will benefit from knowing what changes were made by others shortly after they were made. While filewatcher won't report who made a particular change (unless the change itself includes that information), the fact that multiple eyes see every change makes for a much more proactive environment. And, if an invalid change is made, correcting or rolling back to the previous version is trivial.

How Can I Download filewatcher?

How Does filewatcher Work?

filewatcher is typically run from cron at whatever frequency you feel comfortable with -- the scheduling frequency determined the mimimum time that will elapse before filewatcher can detect a change. When filewatcher runs, it loads its configuration file and determines which files need to be checked based on their defined scan interval. If a change has previously been detected for a particular file, that file will not be checked again until its scan interval timer has expired.

Detailed documentation may be found here. This same documentation is included within filewatcher in POD format.