Re: File system watcher/monitoring

On 15/02/13 14:20, Sebastian Krebs wrote:

2013/2/15 Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa <ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net>

Hi Stas, On 14/02/13 22:37, Stas Malyshev wrote:

Hi! 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.

I think it'd be great to have a library with unified interface and an extension that uses it. However, I'm not sure if these libraries are useful in common php use case - short-lived requests. Could I get the changes since the last request? Or is it useful only for long-running persistent processes?

It is only useful for long-running processes. For example when you are writting tests: at each modifications, you would like to re-run or re-generate tests. In this case, you have a daemon that watches files changes and executes a command when needed.

Why do you need PHP for this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3283228/bash-execute-script-on-file-save#answer-3283390 I don't understand your point.

-- 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/