# Gamin the File Alteration Monitor

## Overview

Main Menu

- Home
- Overview
- Using gamin
- Configuration
- News
- Downloads
- Python bindings
- Developers informations
- Contacts
- FAQ
- Debugging Gamin
- Security
- Internals
- Differences from FAM
- ChangeLog

Related links

- Mail archive
- FAM project
- sources
- GNOME Bugzilla
- Red Hat Bugzilla

Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of the FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system.

The main goals of the project are:

1. minimize the security model of FAM, the daemon runs under the user account, it is compatible with SELinux
2. simplify the code base, dropping some of the most exotic feature of FAM
3. provide an API and ABI compatible replacement for FAM
4. try to fix some other issues like resource consumption

Gamin also serves as an interface to test the inotify mechanism to improve the existing dnotify monitoring interface present in the Linux kernel.

At this point Gamin is fairly tied to Linux, portability is not a primary goal at this stage but if you have portability patches they are welcome.

From an historical point of view, gamin builds from the marmot project authored by James Willcox and Corey Bowers and then heavilly modified to turn it into a minimalist FAM replacement (Francophones will appreciate the filiation from fam to marmot and gamin.)

This library is available under the terms of the GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, and a copy of it should be found in the source under the COPYING file.

Daniel Veillard