Thanks for the response, guys. I'm pleased that I don't have to write such a thing from scratch, Especially as I'm fairly new to Perl!
Well, when I've been manually testing the file processing, it hasn't taken much time (20->30secs). And I'm not expecting much traffic, so I can take it easy with the programming for now! However on a later project, doing much the same thing, _that_ will be more of a challenge (more traffic, huge audio files, lots of directories), so thanks for the pointers! Regs Rupert Heesom Asst Distribution Engineer Adventist World Radio -----Original Message----- From: Jenda Krynicky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 02 July 2002 15:36 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: How would I go about "watching a directory"? From: Felix Geerinckx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > on Tue, 02 Jul 2002 13:57:59 GMT, Rupert Heesom wrote: > > > I want to set up a perl script under W2K to watch a set of > > directories for new files. > > See Win32::ChangeNotify + use Win32::IPC qw(wait_any); > > Another secondary question would be "How do I daemonise a script?" > > under W2K? > > See > <http://www.perlguy.com/articles/nt_service.html> > > to find out how to turn a perl program into an NT service (maybe it > also works on W2K). It does of course work on Win2k and WinXP. I woud not recommend using srvany.exe though. It's much better to use either ActiveState's PerlSvc (pert of Perl Dev. Kit) or Dave Roth's Win32::Daemon ( should be instalable via PPM ) There's another thing ... if the processing of the files takes a lot of time it might be better to use two threads. One that would watch the directories, the other that would process the files. You do not need a lot of synchronization in this, a single one-way pipe should be enough. Jenda P.S.: I made a service that translates our ASPs and web pages for multilingual websites that does just this. One thread watches the directories and tests the service status and sends commands like "directory X changed", "reload initfile", "check for updated translations" and "quit" to the worker thread. You might find handy my Win32::BiggerPipe ( http://jenda.krynicky.cz/perl/BiggerPipe.pm ) in case the processing takes long and the changes happen too often. =========== [EMAIL PROTECTED] == http://Jenda.Krynicky.cz ========== There is a reason for living. There must be. I've seen it somewhere. It's just that in the mess on my table ... and in my brain I can't find it. --- me -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]