libbigbro

libbigbro is a library that provides two functions that enables you to run a command (i.e. fork and exec on a posix system) and track what files it reads or modifies. These two functions, bigbro and bigbro_with_mkdir are declared in bigbro.h, which documents their behavior in a comment.

bigbro

bigbro is a simple demo utility that uses libbigbro to run a changes specified on the command line. It has no command-line flags, and is as easy to use as strace:

$ ./bigbro mail
No mail for droundy
r: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblockfile.so.1.0
r: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/liblockfile.so.1
r: /usr/bin/bsd-mailx
r: /usr/bin/mail
r: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
r: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0.7.0
r: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.19.so
r: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbsd.so.0
r: /etc/mail.rc
r: /etc/ld.so.cache
r: /etc/alternatives/mail

The purpose of bigbro is primarily to enable easy testing of libbigbro.

Building

To build bigbro, you just need run:

sh build/linux.sh

If you have fac installed, you can alternatively build bigbro using fac. In this case, you can also simultaneously build bigbro and run the test suite, by running:

python3 run-tests.py