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another alternative would be Tripwire
Install the Tripwire filesystem monitoring tool Tripwire does pretty much the same thing as this Perl script does with the -md5 option, but with the option of customizing what checks are performed on each category of files. So, for example, you can simply check to make sure that your log files haven't been deleted and haven't had their ownership changed, but you can also check to make sure that system executables haven't had their contents replaced with Trojan code. It takes a lot of work to customize properly, but once you're done, you can be relatively sure that you'll catch any system modifications that are done. Tripwire has been available for Mac OS X for a few months now.
comparing the alternatives
I think Tripwire occupies a different ecological niche. It is explicitly concerned with security and is far more sophisticated, with concomitant complexity of use.
Of similar sophistication but in a slightly different niche is Radmind - it is usually used for maintaining multiple machines in a known state. A bit lower on the complexity scale but still considerably more sophisticated than the 'watchfile' script is the bubblegum program. It is a compiled C program that is designed to run as a daemon. The 'watchfile' script was intended mostly for impromptu troubleshooting sessions where the ease of modification of a script (as opposed to a compiled executable) is often a big advantage.
Using bubblegum
hayne,
running programs in the background
You don't need to run the 'watchfile' script in the foreground of a Terminal window. You can start any program in the background by adding an ampersand (&) at the end of the invocation command. If the program sends results to the terminal window (as 'watchfile' does) then you need to redirect the output into a file.
E.g. you could run the above example in the background as follows:
running programs in the background
Thanks a bunch, I'm somewhat new to unix/linux. What happens if you dont redirect the output to a file and if there is eventually output, where does that output go or is there an error?
running programs in the background
Also, if I were to run this script watchfile in the background as you described and quit the Terminal, how would I later on kill this process. Usually I use "jobs" to find the currently running jobs, but this only applies to my current tty.
ps
You can kill any process that you started if you know the process id (pid) by using the 'kill' command. You can find out the pid by using the command 'ps'. |
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