Most filesystems only record when a file was modified (and only the last time it was at that). If you need more information like who did what you're moving into the realm of revision control and will need to go through more than just the "normal" file open/read/write/close operations in order to get changes tracked. You'd need to look into some form of SCM software such as git, mercurial, SVN, bzr (or at a minimum something like RCS, but . . . bleh), but all of those require cooperation from the user making changes and aren't going to just magically remember who's doing what to arbitrary files. If you have non-technical users the simplest option is to provide wrappers and tell the lusers to run make-change-to-foo before they make a change and done-changing-foo afterwards.

I also want to say that I think ClearCase provided a filesystem view to their repository which might behave the way you want (where it remembers who makes what changes slightly more transparently), but it's commercial software with a good sized price tag and has a reputation of being kind of a pain to manage.

Update: added note about CC.

Hi,
Thank you very much for your reply!

I get your point; but i am not expecting something that complicated (like a version control/revision history)

I just want to find out this - at some point, when a file gets changed, i just want to find out 'who changed it' and i don't really want to know 'what change he did'.

Also, would be really nice if i can register for a directory/file change event that would trigger my perl script or some sort of event handling or trigger mechanism to fire my script (i am afraid the scheduler in Windoes XP does not seem to support that feature! ). That way at least i need not have my script continuously polling the files to see if any changes have been done!

Thanks
Biswanath

Win32::ChangeNotify will allow you to be informed when a file is modified: name, contents, attributes, ACLs etc.

And Win32::NetAdmin has a LoggedOnUsers() api.

If you're lucky enough that only one user is logged on when the file change occurs, then you have your culprit. Otherwise, you're into a guessing game.

Thanks a lot for the reply!

but is there no way by which we can get the login id of the user who last modified a file? That sounds really wierd!

but is there no way by which we can get the login id of the user who last modified a file?

That information is simply not recorded by standard file systems. It might be recorded by some specialist journaling filesystems, but I do not know of any.

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In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

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This will be vague and also not Perl-related, but... You can enable auditing (the global setting that is turned off by default), and then set the permissions (ACLs) on the file to specify that you want to audit successful attempts to modify the file. Then you just look in the event log to see who modified the file when (only for changes to the file done /after/ you set up auditing, of course).