C# get notified when another process makes changes to a textfile

Question

I would like to be notified in my C# application when another process makes changes to a particular textfile.

The reason for this is that I launch a 3rd party tool from my application in order to retrieve some information about a device. this tool saves the current state of the device into an ini file. This takes some undetermined time, but I want to react and read the state information as soon as it's available.

How can I do this?

This is basically a duplicate of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/721714/notification-when-a-file-changes — arx, Jan 14 '12 at 23:17

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 14 '12 at 23:25

You could use the System.IO.FileSystemWatcher class. Something like this:

string fileToWatch = @"C:\MyFile.txt";
fileSystemWatcher = new FileSystemWatcher(fileToWatch);

void fileSystemWatcher_Changed(object sender, FileSystemEventArgs e)
{
    Debug.WriteLine(e.Name +  " has changed");
}

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:29

2

You can monitor file changes using System.IO.FileSystemWatcher

Also, see Notification when a file changes? for more info.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:29

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answered Jan 14 '12 at 23:23

Arnold Zokas

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C# get notified when another process makes changes to a textfile

2 Answers2