USE changetrack is a program to monitor changes to a bunch of files. If files are modify one day, and the machine start working incorrectly some days later, changetrack can provide information on which files were modified, and help locate the problem. Changetrack will also allow recovery of the files from any stage. This program makes human-readable output, and also uses RCS to allow recovery of any stage of revision. NEW In version 2, enhanced emailing capabilities have been added. Changes to each file can be emailed to a list of email addresses. Email is sent using Mail::SendMail, available from CPAN. changeweb is a CGI script to give a web interface for changetrack. It is recommended for security reasons that this program be in a directory to only allow local users to connect. changeweb must be downloaded separately. INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS This program works on UNIX-type systems. It has been successfully used with Perl 5.004_01 and 5.002. You should just be able to type './install' to install this program. MAINTENANCE It probably would be a good idea to go through and delete extremely out of date changes, to prevent confusion and excessive disk usage. SCHEDULE Changetrack is generally run from the crontab. If you are just worried about occassional changes, running it daily should be sufficient. If you are doing very intense modifications, it might be reasonable to run it every hour (or even more frequently). To keep track of shutdowns and reboots, and especially unplanned reboots (crashes), run changetrack with the option "-m shutdown" in a shutdown script, and with a "-m startup" in a startup script. This will put the shutdown/startup message in each file, after any other changes have been listed. Any "startup" message without a preceding "shutdown" message indicates that the machine was not properly shut down. (This may be more annoyance than help on any machine which is frequently shut down.) TODO * Automate removal of out-of-date changes, to save disk space and clarify the important changes. * Fix any bugs (see the manual). GETTING CHANGETRACK Changetrack is available by anonymous FTP from ftp.zone12.com/pub/changetrack/. To use the email functionality, changetrack requires Mail::SendMail, available from CPAN.