Monitoring changes in extended attributes?

[Kevin Fogleman]

Is there an existing way to monitor the entire filesystem for changes to any file, particularly changes in extended attributes?

I'm looking to write a program that builds an index of all user-accessable extended attributes for every file in the filesystem and then updates that index in real time according to modifications to existing files' attributes, creation of new files and deletion of files. I've read over the documentation for kqueue, but some things were left unclear. For example, it appears that kqueue needs a file descriptor for each file that one would want to monitor, making any large-scale file monitoring impractical. Is there any other way in FreeBSD to be notified of file modifications in a way that would allow one to monitor the whole file system or large portions of it? Also, I'm not very knowledgable about file system conventions, so I'm wondering how one would detect the creation of new files? I don't really need to know whether a particular attribute changed, but rather just whether any of them changed.

BTW, I have posted this question earlier to freebsd-questions, but nobody answered and, judging by the content of the other questions on that list, I thought that my question would be more appropriate here.
--Kevin Fogleman


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