Portable Directory/File watch library in C / C++

Question

Is there a portable library to watch for filesystem changes without polling?

I know there is

but i have not found any portable wrapper for those.

Is there a portable wrapper for Linux, Windows and OS X or a subset of those?

GLib's [GIO](http://developer.gnome.org/gio/2.29/GFileMonitor.html) uses GAMIN which covers Linux & FreeBSD, no idea about OSX or Windows. — Steve-o, Sep 08 '11 at 10:12
Is Java not portable enough for you? Or do you explicitly need a C++ wrapper? — dmeister, Sep 08 '11 at 12:11
Java has a to big memory and diskspace footprint for the task — flob, Sep 08 '11 at 12:31

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 08 '11 at 12:17

5

QFileSystemWatcher -- Qt is very cross-platform.

answered Sep 08 '11 at 12:17

spraff

Sounds like a possible solution. But I experienced the pre-build moc and slow compile/linking unsatisfactory. I still hope a leaner solution exists (without cutting it out of Qt by hand.) – flob Sep 08 '11 at 12:52
CMake makes the MOC stuff very easy, QtCore is a very lightweight library, I never noticed significant extra time to compile/link but you might try GNU Gold as a faster replacement linker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(linker) – spraff Sep 08 '11 at 14:13
FYI: On Windows `QFileSystemWatcher` and `FindNextChangeNotification` wont work correctly on network shares on linx servers which use an outdated version of samba (we have a server running with version 3.0.22, which problems). In such cases you have to force QFileSystemWatcher to use the polling implementation. – smerlin Mar 15 '12 at 08:24

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 08 '12 at 08:31

1

Have a look at jnotify. It's written in java and can run on all the major OSes.

answered Feb 08 '12 at 08:31

slm

2 Answers2