NAME

       famd - The File Alteration Monitor (FAM) daemon

SYNOPSIS

       famd [-CdflLv] [-C conffile] [-p prog.vers] [-t period] [-T timeout]

DESCRIPTION

       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

       -c conffile
              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.

       -p prog.vers
              Register with the portmapper using the specifed RPC program and version numbers.

       -P port
              Bind to the specified TCP port instead of choosing at random.

       -t period
              Poll a remove NFS server every period seconds to obtain file updates if the  remove
              server is not running famd.

       -T timeout
              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.

FILES

       /etc/fam.conf
              Default famd configuration file.

SEE ALSO

       fam(3), fam.conf(5), inetd(8), portmap(8), stat(1), xinetd(8)

BUGS