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
Check my answer to a similar question. You could try the same loop in Python. This page suggests:
import time while 1: where = file.tell() line = file.readline() if not line: time.sleep(1) file.seek(where) else: print line, # already has newline
Also see the question tail() a file with Python.