detect new or modified files with python

Question

I'm trying to detect when a new file is created a directory or when an existing file is modified in a directory.

I tried searching for a script that would do this (preferably in python or bash) but came up short. My environment is linux with Python 2.6

Related Questions:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/415856/how-to-detect-new-or-modified-files

Answer 1

You can use gio which is the Filesystem part of GLib (In GLib's python bindings)

import gio

def directory_changed(monitor, file1, file2, evt_type):
   if (evt_type in (gio.FILE_MONITOR_EVENT_CREATED,
       gio.FILE_MONITOR_EVENT_DELETED)):
       print "Changed:", file1, file2, evt_type

gfile = gio.File(".")
monitor = gfile.monitor_directory(gio.FILE_MONITOR_NONE, None)
monitor.connect("changed", directory_changed)

however, your program must be running a GLib mainloop for the events to arrive. One quick way to test that is by using:

import glib
ml = glib.MainLoop()
ml.run()

GLib is a high-level library which is well suited for Applications. You don't have to care about which underlying system it uses for the file monitoring.

---

I now see you use Fedora Core 2. Really version 2? That might be too old to use GIO in GLib. Pyinotify that has been mentioned might be a better solution, although less portable.

Answer 2

If you're using Linux, you may try pyinotify that acts like an object-oriented wrapper around the inotify(7) system calls. The project website contains quite straightforward tutorials and examples.

Answer 3

If you can use PyQt, there's QFileSystemWatcher that does just this.

Answer 4

There are also Python bindings for gamin.