Re: File system watcher/monitoring

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa < ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net> wrote: > Hi internal, > > A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available for > almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP through > pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have /dev/fsevents (not available in PHP, > since we need ioctl to do that in pure PHP —and sudo—, no C extension > needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have FileSystemWatcher > in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready to use. > > By now, if we didn't use these solutions, we should use a finder (thanks > to RecursiveIteratorIterator and DirectoryIterator in SPL) that runs every > n seconds and compute a diff with the previous run. This solution works > fine for a small set of files but it can slow for a big one. This is just a > tricky solution, not a proper one. > > Possible domains where it is needed: test, CI, log, file transfering, > security etc. > > Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma allows > it)? or do you want such a feature? > > Best regards :-). Hello :-) I don't see why we would have such a thing into PHP Core. We are already smooth about the file system accesses with a realpath cache, and users may use different pecl ext if they want to take hand on a lib such as inotify. Julien