On Jan 13, 2005, at 15:03, Wolfgang Keller wrote:
Is there a way to write "folder actions" for MacOS X in Python? I would guess to enable this the corresponding script would at least have to be applescript-able itself...?
You'd need to write an applescript that spawns a Python process (or talks to a Python application via some means like XML-RPC or apple events).
Related question: I read somewhere that FreeBSD has a similar notification
mechanism built-in - is this feature available in MacOS X as well or does
it depend on the "native" BSD filesystem? If it is available, is there a
way (preferably without havong to learn C) to use it from Python on MacOS
X?
This feature is available in Mac OS X 10.3 and later. Using it from Python on Mac OS X requires either patching some ancient C extension for kqueue and calling it from Python, writing your own extension, using ctypes or PyObjC 1.2 to call directly into it, or using PyObjC to talk to an Objective-C wrapper (ReSTedit <http://svn.red-bean.com/restedit/trunk/> does this).
There are no examples that I'm aware of beyond ReSTedit, and it does not monitor directories, only files. I believe that there is a limitation in kqueue that will only tell you that something in the directory has changed, but not what is changed, so I think some sort of "polling" needs to be done to figure out what actually did change. At least that's what I remember from hearing about the FreeBSD implementation, I'm not aware if Darwin has implemented any enhancements to kqueue.
Any other way to implement such a function in Python without having to poll
the corresponding folder all the time (ouch)?
Not really, unless you install FAM <http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/> (may need to find a patch for kqueue, don't know if they support it yet) or dnotify <http://www.student.lu.se/~nbi98oli/dnotify.html> and talk to that.
I believe that Finder uses a combination of polling and notifications. Properly written Mac OS X applications will send out a notification when they modify a file (this can be done with either Cocoa or Carbon), and Finder uses this to immediately update its views. It also polls to pick up changes done by lower level APIs, but I'm not sure at what frequency (it might be when the user acts on a Finder view, or something).
-bob
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