Track activity of a user

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi All

We have a job which writes files to a server at a particular time. The files will be created by a particular user ID

Today, during the execution of the job, it created a file to the server and the file sat on the server for sometime, but was deleted immediately at the end of the job(which is few seconds after the file creation).
we are aware that this is caused ONLY by the job, but is there any way I can track the activity during that time like :

  1. To see how big was the file
  2. when was it created
  3. how long was it present, before it was deleted

I assume there will be something written to the Linux server when an action is performed.

Thanks all in advance!!

2

Do we have a naming convention for the files here? Are all the files dropped into (and later removed from) the same directory? I'm assuming the job and the files reside on the same file system.

3

Yes we do. The name would be something like FTUPDATE.txt. The files will be written to a directory by the job and they are not deleted.

4

Looks like a job for inotifywatch on Linux systems.

Hope that helps
Regards
Peasant.

1 Like
5

Thanks Peasant! I will check that command. I have never tried that before.