script to evaluate if a passwd file has changed

[Piston4]

I need help on creating a script which evaluates whether or not the passwd file has changed.

[sathiya]

There is more than one way to do it.

One of it is, find out the md5sum of the passwd file and write it somewhere. From the second invocation find and compare the md5sum which will tell you whether there is a change or not ?!

Do it in the programming language you know.. Hope it helped.

[Rubberman]

If you want to do this in real time, then look at the inotify subsystem. You can either write your own application to do this, or use the inotifywait/inotifywatch system commands to detect changes in /etc/passwd (account information), /etc/group (group memberships), and /etc/shadow (where the actual passwords are kept).

[Piston4]

Thanks rubberman that helped me alot!

[Rubberman]

Happy to help. I've just recently become aware of these capabilities when I had such a need to detect when certain files were updated in order to signal some applications that they needed to reload a database into memory for realtime processing in warehouses and assembly lines.