Gamin the File Alteration Monitor

Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of the FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system. This is a service provided by a library which allows to detect when a file or a directory has been modified.

Overview

Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of the FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system.

The main goals of the project are:

  1. minimize the security model of FAM, the daemon runs under the user account, it is compatible with SELinux
  2. simplify the code base, dropping some of the most exotic feature of FAM
  3. provide an API and ABI compatible replacement for FAM
  4. try to fix some other issues like resource consumption

Gamin also serves as an interface to test the inotify mechanism to improve the existing dnotify monitoring interface present in the Linux kernel.

At this point Gamin is fairly tied to Linux, portability is not a primary goal at this stage but if you have portability patches they are welcome.

From an historical point of view, gamin builds from the marmot project authored by James Willcox and Corey Bowers and then heavilly modified to turn it into a minimalist FAM replacement (French litterate will appreciate the filiation from fam to marmot and gamin.)

This library is available under the terms of the GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, and a copy of it should be found in the source under the COPYING file.

News

0.0.7: Aug 24 2004

0.0.6: Aug 19 2004

Downloads

You can download gamin from the GNOME project pages, either as sources, and binaries or source RPMs.

Developers informations

The CVS base is in the GNOME project CVS base at cvs.gnome.org, the module name is gamin. See the Gnome CVS Tools page for more information on using CVS.

We expect bug reports to be entered in GNOME bugzilla or in Red Hat bugzilla.

Contacts

The best way to contact the developers is to use the mailing-list gamin-list@gnome.org.

Before reporting a bug please double-check:

Then the best way is to log the bug in one of the bugzilla or join the list and post there if you think that some of gamin design or code should be changed.