WARNING: mescalero is still a bit experimental -- use at your own risk ;)

Mescalero is being developed as a lightweight tool for file system consistency
checking. It is targeted toward unix-like OS but has so far only been
tested on Linux. Both mescalero's settings and the filesystem status itself
are stored in a single encrypted Sqlite3 database using Sqlcipher 
(<http://sqlcipher.net>). Thus, it should be fairly easy to store
this database offline, on a thumbdrive, etc.

Mescalaro has only a few dependencies which are:

- a recent version of OpenSSL for computing the sha256 file hashes
- the encrypted slite3 backend provided by Sqlcipher 
  <http://sqlcipher.net> for storing the database.


BUILDING:
---------

The build system is pretty crummy right now and uses a single 
Makefile. After adjusting the paths to the sqlcipher include and
object files mescalero should compile fairly straightforwardly. 
Hopefully, the current state of affairs of the build system
will improve soon. Please note that mescalero uses C++11
throughout so you will have to use a recent version of gcc
of clang for compiling.


USAGE:
------

Usage is very simple and fully command line based. Each call
to mescalero needs to supply a password (for encrypting the
database) and path to the database itself (if it doesn't exist
it will be created). If no password is provided mescalero will
ask for one. 

Next, add the paths which mescalero should scan and track, e.g.

# mescalero -p <password> -d <path to database> -f path1 path2 path3

to add path1, path2 and path3. Each path can either be a directory
or individual file. In the former case, all files contained within
the directory will be included (recursively). You can use the -l switch 
to list the currently tracked paths and the -a switch to add (by
prefixing a path with '+' or simply providing a path) or remove (by
prefixing a path with '~') paths from the list.

Then, update the file properties via

# mescalero -p <password> -d <path to database> -u

Depending on the number of files contained within the current set
of paths this may take some time (why not get a nice cup of coffee
in the meantime).

Finally, you can check your filesystem against the information stored
in the database via

# mescalero -p <password> -d <path to database> -c

Mescalero will list all changed files, files that have disappeared,
as well as new files which are present on the filesystem but are missing
from the database. After reviewing the current state you can then
take the proper action or update the database if all looks well.

Enjoy!