gamin

Gamin is a French noun meaning a lively street child or waif. In English usage it describes a mischievous, streetwise boy or girl, often with an affectionate or descriptive nuance. The term has a long literary history and carries connotations of urban poverty, resilience, and informal charm.

In computing, Gamin is the name of an open-source file-change notification system for Unix-like operating systems. It provides a daemon-based service that watches directories for changes and notifies client applications, serving as a more robust and flexible successor to the older FAM (File Alteration Monitor) interface. Gamin has been used by major desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE to trigger automatic updates when files are added, removed, or modified.

Operationally, a Gamin daemon runs in the background and serves registered clients with filesystem events. It relies on platform-specific backends to detect changes, such as inotify on Linux, and can employ alternative mechanisms where necessary. By centralizing change detection, Gamin reduces the need for individual applications to poll for changes.

See also: File Alteration Monitor (FAM), inotify.