Logwatch

A simple MacOS / FreeBSD utility that monitors directories for filesystem events and writes them to a log file.

Introduction

I made this program as a test of my skills with program design and to learn more about FreeBSD / MacOS. In terms of functionality it is quite simple but also useful if you are doing system analysis.

The software was written in a mix of plain C and C++23 and uses kqueue to monitor the events.

Usage

# Writer
./logwatch "dir_to_watch" "output_file.bin"

# Reader
./logread "input_file.bin" # same as the output of the writer

Note: You must first have output from the writer to use the reader

References

These are some articles, docs and git repositories that helped me create this utility:

• https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?kqueue
• https://solarianprogrammer.com/2019/01/13/cpp-17-filesystem-write-file-watcher-monitor/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29999204/kqueue-on-directory-not-trigger-when-file-within-is-modified