site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com I want to watch any directory, anywhere on the file system, or at least, anywhere in my home directory. S+E -- Quinn "The Eskimo!" <http://www.apple.com/developer/> Apple Developer Relations, Developer Technical Support, Core OS/Hardware _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... 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. 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. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com