File Alteration Monitor

The File Alteration Monitor (FAM ) is a software for monitoring filesystems changes.

The free software for Unix -like operating systems developed by Silicon Graphics and done as a system service on behalf of other programs to monitor specific directories. These programs will be notified of FAM and do not even look regularly for changes.

FAM consists of two components: the daemon famd (GPL - licensed ) and the program library libfam (LGPL - licensed ) that represents the interface to the clients.

A built- in newer kernels File Monitor how IMon, dnotify or inotify is used by FAM and increases the efficiency considerably. In this constellation, FAM also offers the advantage of platform independence and the distribution of tasks for network file systems by monitoring jobs are delegated to a possible FAM instance on the server. Disadvantageous FAM affect of adding new large quantities of files, because a lot of additional processor loading. FAM uses if possible notification mechanisms of the kernel and transferred otherwise on the periodic polling of the file system.

FAM is used, for example, file manager like Konqueror, Nautilus or gentoo to keep the file current view and integrated in numerous important BSDs and Linux distributions.

History

Originally FAM was programmed in 1989 by Bruce Karsh for the operating system from SGI IRIX. In 1995 FAM by Bob Miller has been rewritten for Linux and open source.

Especially for Linux, there is a cleavage of FAM called Gamin.