Re: File system watcher/monitoring

Hello Julien, On 14/02/13 15:29, Julien Pauli wrote:

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. Well ok, forget PHP core, but an extension would be great.

-- Ivan Enderlin Developer of Hoa http://hoa-project.net/ PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis) http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/ Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C http://w3.org/