On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:45:20 +0200, Carlos Rafael Giani <e0325834@student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
is a file monitor feature planned for boost.filesystem? I have been looking for a platform independent solution, but there is none (except in toolkits like Qt). Also, so far only inotify (a subsystem in the Linux kernel) can tell me when a file is closed after writing, which is absolutely necessary when watching a plugins/ directory, for example (you don't want to touch the plugins when they're only halfway copied). Several tools watch the plugin directory, but don't care if the plugins are being written or are fully there already. This can lead to instabilities.
I think it is only logical to add this to boost.filesystem, something like set_monitor_callback(pathname, function_object);
I created a directory monitor as a Boost.Asio extension which is used like this: boost::asio::io_service io_service; boost::asio::dir_monitor dir_monitor(io_service); dir_monitor.add_directory("C:\\Test"); boost::asio::dir_monitor_event ev = dir_monitor.monitor(); // or: dir_monitor.async_monitor(...) While I finished the code I didn't have time yet to test it sufficiently. I hope I can put it online in the coming days. While my directory monitor is Windows-only a Linux-only directory monitor is available since August - see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.asio.user/2699. The Linux-only directory monitor is a bit unconventional though as for example it keeps firing events even if you call async_monitor only once. I'd like to see one platform-independent directory monitor in the future but would want to see my Windows-only directory monitor to become stable first. Anyway I'll post another message in a few days when I put the diretory monitor online. Boris