Need a "watching" program

[Jeff Kellem]

In article <8923 at csli.Stanford.EDU> rustcat at csli.stanford.edu (Vallury Prabhakar) writes:
>
>Hi,
>
> I was wondering if there is any way of keeping track of any/every body who
> looks around in my home directory?  'twould be nice if this program could
> create and append to a logfile, each time some user chdir-ed to my $HOME.
>
>						-- Vallury Prabhakar
>rustcat at cnc-sun.stanford.edu

Well, it is possible to find out if a file has been accessed.  Actually,
that is relatively easy, using stat() and keeping track of the last access
time of a particular file.  As far as I know, it is not possible (well, at
least, not that easy) to find out who is accessing the file.  But, you CAN
find out when someone accesses the file.  You may miss some of the file
accesses, if more than one person accesses the file before you check the
access time again.  Hope that helps a little bit.

                            -jeff

Jeff Kellem
INTERNET: composer at bu-cs.bu.edu  (or composer%bu-cs.bu.edu at bu-it.bu.edu)
UUCP: ...!harvard!bu-cs!composer

p.s. This discussion probably does not belong on alt.sources, follow-ups
should go to comp.unix.questions, most likely.  Thanks.