Re: Tracking changes in the filesystem

[Ivan Vučica]

>From what I could Google around, apparently this is done on OS X with FSEvent APIs. Quickly skimming through GNUstep's NSFileManager.m, I did not find any salient reference to "monitor", "watch" or "observe".

Here's what appears to be a Linux-related documentation for a C-based API called "inotify":

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8478

This IBM article also describes "inotify" on Linux:

  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ubuntu-inotify/index.html

but also mentions how to accomplish this on BSD OSes using something called kqueues. Quote:

Note: FreeBSD and thus Mac OS X provide an analog of inotify called kqueue. Type man 2 kqueue on a FreeBSD machine for more information.

I have never experimented with either of these three mentioned APIs.

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:28, Andreas Höschler <ahoesch@smartsoft.de> wrote:

Hi all,

my tool needs to get aware of any changes in the file system under a given directory (e.g. /home), for example if

• a new file is created in /home/tommy/Documents
• a file is removed anywhere below /home
• a file /home/herbert/test.conf gets modified
• ...

I think I have once seen some method of NSFileManager or NSWorkspace that does exactly that, but I don't know this for sure and I can't find anything suitable in the class references.

Any idea?

I could for sure iterate through the dir with contentsOfDirectoryAtPath: and compare the size and attributes of any file with log entries, but this seems rather cumbersome! :-(

Hints greatly appreciated!

Thanks a lot,

 Andreas


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Ivan Vučica - ivan@vucica.net