> Perhaps this relies on a message passing OS - typically you tell the
> OS (and file system indirectly) that you're interested in changes to
> a particular file or directory, and you include some flags saying
> what kinds of changes you are interested (iNode info, file contents,
> etc). Then when the file / directory changes, the file system posts
> a message with the details to the previously supplied message queue,
> which the user level program is reading from.
I don't think it really relies on a message passing OS because Windows
has this type of feature and it isn't a message passing OS.
> You want the linux directory notification (see documentation
> in linux source
> tree). Its not very advanced and not very relieable, but is
> the best thing
> Linux provides.
Thanks. I'll play with it. Unfortunately it only tells you something in
the directory was changed, not what changed. This sucks. I won't know
what changed and to find out I'd have to maintain a hash table of every
inode in the filesystem and do a comparison. Yuck. I'll try it though.
By the way, what do you mean it isn't very reliable?
Scott
