Hi,

I'm searching some pascal code for file monitoring for Linux. That means getting notified if a file in a directory or its sub directories was modified.
I found some hints that people started it, but I can't find the result. Any hints are greatly appreciated.

Or has someone already implemented some bindings for inotify?

Mattias

MSEgui has an implementation based on signals because inotify is not available on old kernels.
lib/common/sysutils/msefilechange.pas.

Martin

Mattias Gaertner wrote

Does this work with thousands of sub directories?

Not tested, probably not. It is used by MSEide.

Martin

Works for me on openSUSE x64, I could not reproduce the problems, sorry.

Martin

Martin Schreiber wrote

> MSEgui has an implementation based on signals because inotify is not available on old kernels. lib/common/sysutils/msefilechange.pas.

Word of caution... I still haven't tracked down why MSEide doesn't notify me or detect external file changes under 64-bit Linux. So somewhere there might still be an implementation bug.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Thanks. Luckily I don't need to support old kernels.

lib/common/sysutils/msefilechange.pas.

Does this work with thousands of sub directories?

Mattias

We have an implementation based on inotify in our project:

http://doublecmd.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/doublecmd/branches/0.5/src/platform/unix/inotify.pp http://doublecmd.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/doublecmd/branches/0.5/src/platform/ufilesystemwatcher.pas

It has only been tested to work on directories.

However, as the docs say:

"Inotify monitoring of directories is not recursive: to monitor subdirectories under a directory, additional watches must be created."

Our implementation is directed at handling few directories, so you would need to optimize it to handle thousands of directories.

Here is something i had in my bookmarks ;)
dont know if its still valid
http://www.friends-of-fpc.org/research/LinuxProgramming/inotify/