RE: Advice wanted on how to proceed . . .
RE: Advice wanted on how to proceed . . .
- Subject: RE: Advice wanted on how to proceed . . .
- From: Quinn <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2006 11:42:07 +0100
At 23:42 -0400 4/7/06, Bruce Fancher wrote:
Because, unless I am mistaken, launchd can only watch a single directory.
That's more-or-less correct. launchd uses kqueues to monitor for
changes in a directory, and this approach requires to you open a file
descriptor for each directory you want to monitor. Clearly that
doesn't scale.
I want to watch any directory, anywhere on the file system, or at least,
anywhere in my home directory.
The ability to receive notification about changes across the entire
file system is a much requested feature. Kauth is the only supported
solution for this right now. However, as you've noted, it involves
kernel code, and that /always/ complicates matters.
You might want to investigate piggybacking on top of the mechanism
used by Spotlight (/dev/fsevents). This is very much /unsupported/:
we can't guarantee that it will be around, or work the same way, on
future systems. If you were developing shrinkwrap software, I would
strongly recommend AGAINST using this, as it's likely that you
software would stop working on future systems. However, from your
post, it seems like you're just working on a solution for yourself,
and I'm sure you can live with the trauma of it breaking (-:
We're hoping to provide a better solution to the global file system
notification problem in future systems, but there are no concrete
plans that I can disclose at this moment.
S+E
--
Quinn "The Eskimo!" <http://www.apple.com/developer/>
Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware
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