[Tutor] Hot Folders?

[Daniel Yoo]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Scott Ralph wrote:

> I'd like to create a hot folder program in Python..  I'm still in the
> learning stage so any help would be great.  Basically I would have a
> folder on my server that if and when a file hits it it will do
> something.. My problem is I'm not sure were to start.  How can I code
> in my script a
> 
> sort of watcher routine that will monitor this folder?  Also how can I
> check if the file is actually done coping into the folder?

Wow!  I've never done this before, so I don't know what's traditionally
done to do monitoring.  One idea is to have your program sleep for a
while, and then every once in a while, check to see if things in your
directory are changing.  Here's some pseudocode:

    dircontents = getDirContents()
    while 1:
        newcontents = getDirContents()
        if dircontents != newcontents:
            doSomething()
            dircontents = newcontents
        sleep(1000)

This won't work unless we define getDirContents(), but that shouldn't be
too bad.  You can do directory stuff with the 'os.path' module.  From a
quick scanthrough, the 'dircache' module also looks useful for this stuff.

This looks like an interesting program!  I hope this helps get you
started.