I was wondering if there are any tools to keep track of the access history of a file. I know of stat, but as far as I understand, it only returns information about the last time the file was accessed.
Access history of a file
files;monitoring;stat
Logging access times is already a fairly heavy requirement (by filesystem performance standards), because it requires a write operation for every read operation. Logging other things would be even costlier. The feature is not present in typical filesystems.LoggedFS is a stackable filesystem that provides a view of a filesystem tree, and can perform fancier logging of all accesses through that view. To configure it, see LoggedFS configuration file syntax.On Linux, you can use the audit subsystem to log a large number of things, including filesystem accesses. Make sure the auditd daemon is started, then configure what you want to log with auditctl. Each logged operation is recorded in /var/log/audit/audit.log (on typical distributions). To start watching a particular file:auditctl -w /path/to/fileIf you put a watch on a directory, the files in it and its subdirectories recursively are also watched.