new file arrivals into a specific directory / folder

[Dave Lilley]

greetings one and all,

My need is this.
Get my program to be executed when ever something new arrives into a
directory.

the data in the directory could be an email or it could be a file. most
likely plain text the transport media unknown yet (transport could be
using email or cellphone / digital RF into the PC ergo a file).

frequency of scans for new arrivals may need to seconds or to minutes so
variability here would be great here too.

From reading months ago I wonder if notify or inotify or even cron would
be good fit.

Does anyone here know of a gem that could do this and if so please point
me in the direction?

Ruby currently using is 1.8.7 not sure if I'll take what i've done to
1.9.x yet.
as I've got to get my 1st project bedded in (this will be another
project taking what i've done a step further).

Or reason for not using ruby for this task of monitoring the directory?

after doing a limited search of the list I've found filewatcher and
directorywatcher just to name 2 at least.

I know these are oldish but is there anything newer/better out there?

I will be using the program on linux (specifically Kubuntu 10.04 but
this maybe moved to a debian dedicated server) desktop pc.


cheers,

dave.

 

[(r.*n){2}]

greetings one and all,

My need is this.
   Get my program to be executed when ever something new arrives intoa
directory.

the data in the directory could be an email or it could be a file. most
likely plain text the transport media unknown yet (transport could be
using email or cellphone / digital RF into the PC ergo a file).

frequency of scans for new arrivals may need to seconds or to minutes so
variability here would be great here too.

From reading months ago I wonder if notify or inotify or even cron would
be good fit.

Does anyone here know of a gem that could do this and if so please point
me in the direction?

Ruby currently using is 1.8.7 not sure if I'll take what i've done to
1.9.x yet.
as I've got to get my 1st project bedded in (this will be another
project taking what i've done a step further).

Or reason for not using ruby for this task of monitoring the directory?

after doing a limited search of the list I've found filewatcher and
directorywatcher just to name 2 at least.

I know these are oldish but is there anything newer/better out there?

I will be using the program on linux (specifically Kubuntu 10.04 but
this maybe moved to a debian dedicated server) desktop pc.

cheers,

dave.

One implementation that may work is to use a currency file (a hidden
file say .currfile). For the very first run, get all the files and at
the end touch this file (if it does not exist). So it is something
like this:

while (forever)
do
save the current timestamp
if .currfile exists
find all files newer than .currfile in directory
else
find all files
end

touch (create/update) .currfile with the saved timestamp.

sleep for some time
done

Depending on how precise that you want the process to be, you may have
to modify this a bit.

This kind of use of currency file was done by news utility in unix to
show only the news items (on command line) that the user has not
already seen.

 

[John W Higgins]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

Morning Dave,

greetings one and all,

My need is this.
Get my program to be executed when ever something new arrives into a
directory.

Very straight forward here. Using the rb-notify library (
http://github.com/nex3/rb-inotify)

i = INotify::Notifier.new

i.watch('/directory', :close_write) do |ev|
puts "#{ev.name.to_s} just added"
end

i.run

You could shell out or embed this in your app or whatever else you wanted
but this will fire the block for every new file placed in the directory.

John

 

[Dave Lilley]

Morning Dave,



Very straight forward here. Using the rb-notify library (
http://github.com/nex3/rb-inotify)

i = INotify::Notifier.new

i.watch('/directory', :close_write) do |ev|
puts "#{ev.name.to_s} just added"
end

i.run

You could shell out or embed this in your app or whatever else you
wanted
but this will fire the block for every new file placed in the directory.

John

many thanks for the heads up think this was what I had read or was it in
a repository and called lib-inotify ruby??

what ever this was what I was looking for.

by the way would cron be a good 2nd?

i.e every X seconds / minutes / hours it spawns/executes my script to to
check for new files / emails and then proceed to process them?

dave.

cheers,