installwatch

This is a fork of installwatch cmd from CheckInstall pkg.

Changes:

• apply the rel debian patches & fixes from the CI bugzilla.
• make the installation step unnecessary.
• force the wrapper script look for the .so in its dir, not in the system one.
• put the compilation results to _build dir.

Tested on Fedora 26 only. For an old changelog, see the orig repo.

Compilation

$ make

It creates _build w/ 2 files: installwatch & installwatch.so. The former is a bash wrapper around the latter. Copy them somewhere & put a symlink to installwatch script into one of PATH dirs.

.so manual usage

$ LD_PRELOAD=_build/installwatch.so touch 123
$ journalctl -ocat -n1
3       open    /home/alex/lib/software/fork/installwatch/123   #success

Quick start

installwatch <command>

This monitors and logs via syslog(3) every created or modified file.

installwatch -o <filename> <command>

does the same thing, but writing data in , which is truncated if it already exits.

A typical usage:

installwatch -o ~/install/foobar-x.y make install

Extra options:

installwatch --help

Description

Installwatch is a utility Pancrazio 'Ezio' de Mauro wrote to keep track of created and modified files during the installation of a new program.

It doesn't require a 'pre-install' phase because it monitors processes while they run.

Installwatch works with every dynamically linked ELF program, overriding system calls that cause file system alterations. Some of such system calls are open(2) and unlink(2).

Installwatch is especially useful on RedHat, Debian and similar distributions, where you can use a package system to keep track of installed software.

Of course a simple 'make install' does not update the package database, making your installation 'dirty' -- well, kind of.

Here's a typical installwatch use. After compiling your brand new package, just type

installwatch make install

instead of a simple make install. Then have a look at your logs.

Installwatch logs by default using syslog(3), with a LOG_USER | LOG_INFO priority.

Usually the log file is /var/log/messages, but if may vary.

If you want to log on a particular file:

installwatch -o filename make install

The log format may look ugly at first glance, but it is designed to be easily processed by programs.

Every record ends with a newline, every field is delimited with a TAB character (it is ^I when you use syslog.)

The fields of a record are, in order:

<return-value> <syscall-name> <arguments> #<comment>

So made lines are really easy to process, if arguments don't contain TABs or pound signs.

Credits

• Orig Installwatch author: Pancrazio 'Ezio' de Mauro p@demauro.net
• CheckInstall maintainer: Felipe Eduardo Sanchez Diaz Duran izto@asic-linux.com.mx

License

GPLv2.