I can't believe it's been three weeks but thank you for this detailed answer. I have been setting up Gentoo on a P400. "emerge system" took up one whole computing weekend. I absolutely love the results. Thanks again. LS Walter Dnes wrote:

On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 12:53:54PM -0500, jkls wrote

...

Ok, I've found where it may be started. It's in inetd.conf. So I wonder why it is always running and do I actually need it?

FAM (File Access Monitor) is a program that monitors constantly monitors specific files for any changes. Here's the theory...

If you're running one program that needs to update a screen when a file changes, the program can poll the file every few seconds. But what if you're running a whole bunch of programs that need to track file changes ? Rather than have several programs scanning your drive, the FAM daemon does all the monitoring and informs client programs when files have changed. If there is any overlap, FAM will inform both clients, polling the file only once, saving a bunch of disk accesses. With multiple file-browsers on multiple desktops, this is supposed to be the most efficient method.

Now for the implementation. FAM is *NOT* a "well-known service" with a reserved port in /etc/services. So it has to register with sunrpc on port 111 (hello L1on and other linux worms of a few years ago) and is assigned an un-used port. Client programs query sunrpc for the port number of FAM, and then talk to FAM on the assigned port. I don't think that programs require FAM to run. This is different from Redhat which set up KDE with dependancies to not install if FAM wasn't installed.

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