Detect File System changes

[Lukas Meyer]

Hello,

I'm trying to detect changes in a directory. E.g if someone crates a
file, i'll execute another function on this file.

I tried to solve this by creating a loop that permanently checks the
contents of this directory with os.listdir() and compares it with the
one before. But this isn't really working properly.

Can anyone give me a hint to get this working?

best regards,

Lukas

[Fuzzyman]

Re: Detect File System changes

The proper way to do this is to use the facilities provided by the
operating system. This means the solution is going to be different for
different platforms. I've *not* done this before - but certainly for
Windows I've seen discussions about this in this group previously.

The win32 extensions expose this capability for windows. I hope this
helps your googling.

All the best,

Fuzzyman
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml

[Noah]

Re: Detect File System changes

In the UNIX world the common tool is FAM -- File Allocation Monitor.
This is a daemon that will report filesystem changes to clients.
There is a Python interface to libfam called "Python FAM" here:

http://python-fam.sourceforge.net/

It looks mature, but I have never used it.

There are also some alternatives to FAM, but I don't remember the names
of them right now.

Yours,
Noah

[Kent Johnson]

Re: Detect File System changes

Lukas Meyer wrote:[color=blue]
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to detect changes in a directory. E.g if someone crates a
> file, i'll execute another function on this file.
>
> I tried to solve this by creating a loop that permanently checks the
> contents of this directory with os.listdir() and compares it with the
> one before. But this isn't really working properly.
>
> Can anyone give me a hint to get this working?[/color]

We just had a thread on this topic:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/b8808c14ecd333ab/ca7110a9776904eb?rnum=4#ca7110a9776904eb

Kent

[Lukas Meyer]

Re: Detect File System changes

Hello,

Thank you for your assistance. I could manage it using your link to the
already discussed thread.

best regards,

Lukas

[Lawrence Oluyede]

Re: Detect File System changes

Il 2005-12-23, Lukas Meyer <lukasmeyer1@gm ail.com> ha scritto:[color=blue]
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to detect changes in a directory. E.g if someone crates a
> file, i'll execute another function on this file.[/color]

pyinotify (wrapper of inotify) is for you (it's not portable however)

http://pyinotify.sourceforge.net/

--
Lawrence - http://www.oluyede.org/blog
"Anyone can freely use whatever he wants but the light at the end
of the tunnel for most of his problems is Python"