On Sunday, 24 December 2023 at 15:51:02 UTC, kdevel wrote:
On Sunday, 24 December 2023 at 14:19:18 UTC, Renato wrote:
I was trying to use a library (fswatch) for watching the file
system
Watching for what?
Your feedback is really abrasive. What a shame, first time I get
this kind of attitude in this forum.
[...]
My code is really basic, when the directory modified timestamp
changes, I list the directory entries with `dirEntries` and
then call `dirEntry.getTimes()` on it.
The right way to implement a function which watches for changes
IN the directory is to use an appropriate notification API,
e.g. inotify [1]. No one wants software running on their
computer which runs in a loop and polls the file system
endlessly though there is no actual work to do.
So, looks like you know what "watch the file system" means then.
Have you ever used notify APIs? Across different operating
systems?
I have and it's a nightmare of incompatible behaviour, very
hit-and-miss, you get too many events or no event at all quite
often.
I know how to implement this without scanning the full tree
efficiently, which is what I intend to do. In my case, the
fswatch library would scan the full tree anyway as it's not
implemented properly for Mac.
Anyway, I didn't ask you for your opinion on this, I asked what
could be causing an Exception in my code to happen as that was
quite unexpected.
```d
[...]
entry.getTimes(ac, st);
```
You know what symlinks [2] are? You want the timestamps of the
symlink and not that of the pointed-to file. In C you would use
`lstat` instead of `stat` for that purpose.
Sometimes symlinks are used to link to objects which are not
located in the filesystem [3]. Trying to use getTimes on such
object throws an exception.
[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/inotify.7.html
[2] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/symlink.7.html
[3] e.g. `ls -laF /proc/self/ns` in Linux.
Have you ever seen a symlink like the one I'd posted?
```
.#hi.txt -> renato@renato.902129:1701726658
```
Does that look like your regular symlink? I don't think it
does... that's what I was actually trying to find out and hoped
others here would've seen this weird behaviour before.
But yeah, in the end, I fixed my code by only reacting to files
and directories.
Merry Christmas to you too.
