Detecting system changes with Dnotify

FILE RESCUE

Article from Issue 63/2006
Author(s):

We'll show you how you can avoid the tragedy of lost files with a transparent, Perl-based version control system.

During early phases of a project, developers tend to experiment with various options, and sometimes it is too early to save prototypes in the version control system. If you haven’t set up a repository, or if you haven’t been able to agree on its structure, you might find yourself working without a safety net. In this case, good code might fall victim to an over-zealous rm * or your editor’s delete command. This month’s Perl script, noworries, can give you automatic version control. Whenever you save a file with your editor, and whenever you use the shell to manipulate files using commands like rm or mv, a daemon hidden in the background receives a message. When it does, it picks up the new or modified file, and uses RCS to version the file. All of this is transparent to the user. Figure 1 shows a user creating and then deleting a new file in the Shell. Without some Perl wizardry, the file, myfile would have been gone for good, but calling noworries -l myfile tells us that the versioner created a backup copy just 17 seconds earlier. noworries -r 1.1 myfile retrieves the file and writes its content to STDOUT.

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