How to write a daemon program to monitor symbolic links?

[Falcolas]

On Oct 23, 1:25 pm, Peng Yu <pengyu... at gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as I know, linux doesn't support a system level way to figure
> out all the symbolic links point to a give file. I could do a system
> wide search to look for any symbolic link that point to the file that
> I am interested in. But this will be too slow when there are many
> files in the systems.
>
> I'm thinking of writing a daemon program which will build a database
> on all the symbolic links that point to any files. Later on, whenever
> I change or remove any file or symbolic link, I'll will notify the
> daemon process the changes. By keeping this daemon process running, I
> can quickly figure out what symbolic links are pointing to any give
> file.
>
> But I have never make a daemon program like this in python. Could
> somebody point me what packages I need in order to make a daemon
> process like this? Thank you!

I would recommend looking into some articles on creating well behaved
daemons and review python recipes for creating daemonic processes.
>From there, it's mostly a matter of writing code which is fairly self
reliant. The ability to write to the system logs (Python module
syslog) helps quite a bit.

http://www.google.com/search?q=writing+daemons
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/278731/

I typically write a program which will run from the command line well,
then add a switch to make it a daemon. That way, you have direct
control over it while writing the daemon, but can then daemonize it
(using the activestate recipe) without making changes to the code.

Garrick