What is FAM?
FAM, the File Alteration Monitor, provides an API that applications can use to be notified when specific files or directories are changed. FAM comes in two parts: fam, the daemon that listens for requests and delivers notification, and libfam, a library that client applications can use to communicate with fam. FAM was originally written for IRIX in 1989 by Bruce Karsh, and was rewritten in 1995 by Bob Miller. This open-source release of FAM builds and runs on both Linux and IRIX, and is almost identical to the version of FAM that ships with IRIX 6.5.x.
