Detect File Change Without Polling [duplicate]

Question

I'm trying to use a method within a Python program to detect whether a file on the file system has been modified. I know that I could have something run on an every-5-seconds to check the last modification date off of the system, but I was curious as to whether there's an easier method for doing this, without needing to require my program to check repeatedly.

Does anyone know of such a method?

Answer 1

watchdog

Excellent cross platform library for watching directories.

From the website

Supported Platforms

• Linux 2.6 (inotify)

• Mac OS X (FSEvents, kqueue)

• FreeBSD/BSD (kqueue)

• Windows (ReadDirectoryChangesW with I/O completion ports; ReadDirectoryChangesW worker threads)

• OS-independent (polling the disk for directory snapshots and comparing them periodically; slow and not recommended)

I've used it on a couple projects and it seems to work wonderfully.