Old readme:

A short daemon for monitoring and logging certain Linux values. I created this program to run as a daemon to monitor my EEE-PC Arch-Linux torrent seedbox. It's supposed to be very, very lightweight. It's purpose is to collect the raw values and write them to the log files. No processing whatsoever.

It's so lightweight that the only way to configure it for your system is to edit the macros in the C source file. (2013 note: this made be laugh.)

When the program starts a new header is added which looks like this:

=mem_free;mem_total;bat_last_full;fan_speed

It starts adding values separated by ;:

1800000;2000000;1000;1500

When a new line is added, if the last value is identical, the value will be replaced with a null string:

1800100;;1001;    - means 1800100;2000000;1001;1500

Except that the last ; are eliminated. So if just the bat_last_full changes the line will be:

;;1001

This is why the values should be arranged by their likelihood of changing. The most variable being first.

If the log grows beyond 1 MiB (the default value) the log file will be renamed log000001 and an new log file will be created. When that file grows beyond the limit, log000002 will be created. The next number is determined by incrementing the largest number log file. This is done so that the log files will always be in order and so that you can remove older log files.

Creating a new log doesn't mean that the headers will be added. The purpose of the headers is to indicate to the program that does the processing what the values mean. So they are only written at startup because the values may change because if the program is modified and recompiled.

To generate the full log you concatenate the log files in order and then add the log file (so log000002, log000003, and log).

You read line by line. If the line starts with = it is a header line. The header names are separated by ;. The following lines contain the values for those names in order again separated by ;. If the value is empty (i.e. "") then it hasn't changed. If the line contains fewer values than the number of columns, then those values haven't changed.

If a new header is found, then the columns might change order, disappear or might be new ones.

Python example of processing:

# This dictionary will contain the list of values for each of the column names.
valuesDict = {}
headers = None

def aNewLine(line):
    if line.startswith("="):
        headers = line[1:].split(";")
    else:
        values = line.split(";")
        for i in xrange(len(values)):
            try:
                vect = valuesDict[headers[i]]
                vect.append(values[i])
            except KeyError:
                vect = [values[i]]
                valuesDict[headers[i]] = vect
            if vect[-1] == "":
                vect[-1] = vect[-2]