[timmerk]

I'm trying to figure out how to detect when a file changes (i.e. is modified, created, etc) in OS X, similar to the .NET way with FileSystemWatcher class (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...emwatcher.aspx ) Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Chuckit]

The Mac API for watching files is the kqueue function. Uli Kusterer has created a Cocoa wrapper for it. (There's also an unrelated Carbon API for watching files, but I don't think it's as precise.)

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

(There's also an unrelated Carbon API for watching files, but I don't think it's as precise.)

It's really pretty useless in my experience; I spent a while back on 10.3 trying to write a spotlight-alike (locate + dynamically updating db, basically). Ended up giving up on it due to the lack of good file monitoring APIs in 10.3.

[timmerk]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man 

It's really pretty useless in my experience; I spent a while back on 10.3 trying to write a spotlight-alike (locate + dynamically updating db, basically). Ended up giving up on it due to the lack of good file monitoring APIs in 10.3.

What is useless? The Carbon way, or the kqueue way, or both?

Thanks!

[Catfish_Man]

The Carbon API for file watching. kqueue works great for a limited number of files (and Uli's objc wrapper for it is great ), although it still doesn't meet the needs of something like spotlight that has to watch the entire filesystem.

[Thinine]

There will be Leopard API enhancements in this area.