• This software is owned by The university of California, Irvine, and is not distributed under any version of the GPL. GPL is a fine series of licenses, but the owners of the software need it to be distributed under these terms.
    stamp is a simple software system that allows you to take an md5-based snapshot of what a system looks like at a given point (not quite an instant) in time.

    You can also compare two such snapshots, to see what's changed.

    I've used stamp for years for primarily two purposes:

    1. I set up our autoinstall procedure to automatically stamp all systems installed, shortly after installation. This makes it pretty easy to see what files have changed on a system since it was first installed - which is especially useful, say, just prior to an upgrade.
    2. I've also used it successfully, when installing misbehaved applications that like to scribble all over the system disk rather than going into a single directory hierarchy, to get a list of files that the installation process changes. Specifically, one would:
      1. generate a stamp
      2. install your software
      3. generate another stamp
      4. (automatically) compare the two stamps to see what's different

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    Timestamp: 2024-03-28 16:59:10 PDT

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