FAM, the File Alteration Monitor, is a subsystem that
applications can use to be notified when specific files
or directories are changed. It is intended as a
replacement for mechanisms such as poll and select.
FAM comes in two parts: famd, the daemon that listens
for requests and provides notifications, and libfam,
a library that client applications can use to
communicate with FAM. For further information on libfam,
see the fam(3) manual page.
famd is normally started by an Internet superserver
such as inetd or xinetd, but can also be started
independently. Only one instance of famd can be
run at a time.
famd can be configured by editing the famd configuration
file (see fam.conf(5) for further details) or by
providing the following command line options:
OPTIONS
-cconffile
Read configuration information from conffile.
-C
Run in backwards compatibilty mode. This is disables
authentication and is not recommended.
-f
Run in the foreground.
-v
Enable verbose messages.
-d
Enable verbose messages and debug messages.
-l
Disable polling of files on remote NFS servers.
-L
Only accept connections from local clients.
-r
Detect read-only filesystems.
-pprog.vers
Register with the portmapper using the specifed RPC program
and version numbers.
-Pport
Bind to the specified TCP port instead of choosing at random.
-tperiod
Poll a remove NFS server every period seconds
to obtain file updates if the remove server is not running famd.
-Ttimeout
Exit timeout seconds after the last client disconnects.
A value of 0 causes famd to run forever.
SECURITY
famd never opens the files it's monitoring, and only monitors
files that the client can stat.