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devaj
September 10th, 2012, 09:21 AM
Hi, I would like to know is there any application or command to trace the files that are changed whenever we change a configuration parameter of an application via it's graphical interface.
Say when changing the Calculator's show decimal places parameter through it's preference menu,I would love to have an application or a command that looks over which files (only the name of the files any other feature would be a plus) are being affected via this action .I Hope I have made myself clear.Do let me know if you need any more clarification.

Frogs Hair
September 10th, 2012, 02:45 PM
Each application has a configuration file/s and by entering properties with a right click the accessed and modified date are displayed. A specific change may be difficult to find though.

TheFu
September 10th, 2012, 02:54 PM
Hi, I would like to know is there any application or command to trace the files that are changed whenever we change a configuration parameter of an application via it's graphical interface.
Say when changing the Calculator's show decimal places parameter through it's preference menu,I would love to have an application or a command that looks over which files (only the name of the files any other feature would be a plus) are being affected via this action .I Hope I have made myself clear.Do let me know if you need any more clarification.

The program you seek is called find. Check out the mtime option.

$ man findwill explain everything, but something like the following should work:

$ find /some/directory -mtime -1 to find all files modified in the last hour. If that isn't fine enough detail, you can pipe that output through grep to look for specific hh:mm timestamps. You'll want to add the -ls option so that data is available for the grep.

If you want the output sorted in some way, you can pipe THAT output through sort and pick the columns, places to be sorted forward or reverse ....

This is the core power of UNIX-like OSes. Once you solve this problem, save it as a script for later use. You'll never really have to solve it again. I have hundreds ... er .... thousands of little scripts like this. Many are run every day, automatically, to do things for me - like computers are supposed to. The results are emailed to me, so I don't need to hunt them down.