Program to monitor new exe files in Windows (C/C++)

Question

I am currently looking for a program or source in C / C++ that will allow me to monitor any new executable files and output the results to a text file

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

You can write a reasonable program to do this as a file system filter driver. The documentation should help you.

Answer 2

disclaimer: this is not a real answer

the thing is

• what is the definition of an executable file
• what is a new executable file (created locally, created on a network location, found in indexing service, launched process etc. etc.)

Regardless of what it is that you wanted to, there are a hundred ways in which you could want to design your application (as a service, high security, as a shell extension, as a DLL Hook, as a debug monitor, using filesystemwatcher or using indexing service, using filesystem scanning or using shadow copies; using filetype fingerprints or using name based patterns, brute force (all files/folders) or targeted (only Program Files and WINDOWS\System32).

You can include alternative filestreams, or you can skip them. You can include scripts, you can include registered COM components.

I get the feeling this question bight be tad too broad as written :)

I suggest you take up a mindmapping tool, or ask your client for specifications of requirements and come back once you know what you want to do, but are trying to get past a technical hurdle.

Answer 3

If you're just interested in watching the file system for new files with a specific extension or extensions then it's trivially easy using the .net framework filesystem watcher: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesystemwatcher.aspx