Re: Watching a directory, was Re: how would you do this?
David Wright wrote:
> On Wed 18 Aug 2021 at 20:55:12 (-0400), songbird wrote:
>> let's suppose you have a directory where there are
>> various scripts, libraries, programs, data, etc.
>>
>> you want to know exactly which other scripts, libraries,
>> etc. use them and to log each caller to know the name so
>> it can be tracked down (location would be nice too, but
>> that could be found later if needed).
>>
>> i don't need to keep the information in a database as
>> just having the log file will be enough.
>>
>> how would you do this?
>>
>> this isn't a homework assignment i'm just curious how
>> easy or hard this would be to accomplish.
>
> Easy.
>
> $ inotifywait -m -e access --timefmt "%F %T" --format "%T %f" the-directory/
>
> To try it, just type in that line, using a sensible directory name.
> (The package name to install first is inotify-tools.)
>
> Change the formats to taste. Pipe into a while IFS=$'\n' read Filename ; do
> loop if you want to do something with the output. See:
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/03/msg01494.html
>
> for a real script (waiting on close-writeable-file, rather than just
> access) that I use a lot for stealing files from FireFox's cache
> (~/.cache/mozilla/firefox/foo.bar.profile/cache2/entries/).
thanks! very interesting! :)
thank you to others who replied also. :)
i was wondering if there was a general tool available as on
debian-devel they are talking about usr-merge and if there was a
simple way to find out who's using /bin and such instead of
/usr/bin, but also the idea of being able to set up a honeypot
on your own system and see if any programs or processes you
haven't done yourself are accessing it. might give you a
warning of being hacked, but of course there are other things
going on in a system which you expect to access things so it
is an interesting way to find out what is happening...
after many years and a lot of different things being set up
i think it is a good idea to keep an eye on what is happening.
especially with how things are going these days.
songbird
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