Shell Programming and Scripting

Dear all,

Need a quick help/suggestion on monitoring a particular directory .
We have a deployment directory say (/users/integration/deploy ) under this there are several files which can be edited by a number of users -

We need to write a script which will check this deployment directory for possible modification at the end of day (every day) and list out those users who modified the files under it.

Appriciate Your suggestion on this .

Thanks
Mahapatra

You'll need some kind of audit for this. Whatever your OS is, check if there is an auditing tool/suite available.

kindly let me know the operating system u r using..
u can write a script wherein u can list the files and get the user who have modified.
the code goes something like this!
ls -lrt | awk '{print $4}'

Thanks Zaxxon - I have no idea on any audit tool.

I thought the sudoers file might have this kind of information and a sysadmin will be able to tell all these info.
But i was told the same thing what you suggest( a audit script) - I am not able to relate -
How to find who change the file , i know i can find when the file was last changed but not the other.

Any thought ?

Thanks again
Jambesh

---------- Post updated at 04:23 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:18 PM ----------

Thanks Vkca ,

However this will not help. ls -ltr | awk {prin $4 }' will give the file owner name and not the real user who edit this .

Let say one file a.x which is owned by unix-admin and has write access to group and that group has 50 users.

Now who whever change the files from the 50 users your command will always list the owner and not the real user.
Hope you got what i am looking for.

Thanks
Jam

Hi.

Many wikis keep file transactions in a source-control scheme. The simplest and fastest way to set up an auditing facility for a small number of files might be to find a wiki that suits you, say from List of wikis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (or from your own repository), install it, create your file(s), and let your users have at it. (Many details omitted for the sake of brevity.)

Good luck ... cheers, drl

As said, it is dependent what Operating System you are using, in other words: What kind of Unix or Linux distribution you are using dictates what kind of auditing software is available to you.
As a start you could simply google for the name of your OS and the string "auditing". I've found following articles for Linux for example:

Linux system auditing by example
Linux.com :: Detect insider threats with Linux auditing