How do I watch a file for changes?

Question

I have a log file being written by another process which I want to watch for changes. Each time a change occurs I\'d like to read the new data in to do some processing on it

Answer 1

It should not work on windows (maybe with cygwin ?), but for unix user, you should use the "fcntl" system call. Here is an example in Python. It's mostly the same code if you need to write it in C (same function names)

import time
import fcntl
import os
import signal

FNAME = "/HOME/TOTO/FILETOWATCH"

def handler(signum, frame):
    print "File %s modified" % (FNAME,)

signal.signal(signal.SIGIO, handler)
fd = os.open(FNAME,  os.O_RDONLY)
fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_SETSIG, 0)
fcntl.fcntl(fd, fcntl.F_NOTIFY,
            fcntl.DN_MODIFY | fcntl.DN_CREATE | fcntl.DN_MULTISHOT)

while True:
    time.sleep(10000)