How to automatically run a python file when a new file is added to its folder or at a time of day?

Question

My python program takes a statistics file and does some stuff on it. It gets a new stats file everyday, so I need the program to automatically run when a new file is added.

Or it could run at the same time every day.

Thanks

What operating system? The answers to these questions vary quite a bit among them. — sblom, Jun 14 '12 at 18:20
On linux/unix type systems, run a cron job to run your script, and on windows, you might want to use a service — Snakes and Coffee, Jun 14 '12 at 18:20
See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/597903/monitoring-files-directories-with-python — pingw33n, Jun 14 '12 at 18:26

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 14 '12 at 18:51

There are quite a few possibilities:

Windows:

Use Task Scheduler to run the script every day at given intervals.
Use the watchdog library to monitor a directory for new files and process it as soon a new file is created. This requires your python script to run endless in a loop (or daemonize it)

Linux:

Use crond to run the script at given intervals
Use also watchdog or pyinotify to monitor a directory for new files ...

How to automatically run a python file when a new file is added to its folder or at a time of day?

1 Answers1