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

ACTIONS = {
  1 : "Created",
  2 : "Deleted",
  3 : "Updated",
  4 : "Renamed from something",
  5 : "Renamed to something"
}
FILE_LIST_DIRECTORY = 0x0001

class myThread (threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, threadID, fileName, directory, origin):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.threadID = threadID
        self.fileName = fileName
        self.daemon = True
        self.dir = directory
        self.originalFile = origin
    def run(self):
        startMonitor(self.fileName, self.dir, self.originalFile)

def startMonitor(fileMonitoring,dirPath,originalFile):
    hDir = win32file.CreateFile (
        dirPath,
        FILE_LIST_DIRECTORY,
        win32con.FILE_SHARE_READ | win32con.FILE_SHARE_WRITE,
        None,
        win32con.OPEN_EXISTING,
        win32con.FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS,
        None
    )
    # Wait for new data and call ProcessNewData for each new chunk that's
    # written
    while 1:
        # Wait for a change to occur
        results = win32file.ReadDirectoryChangesW (
            hDir,
            1024,
            False,
            win32con.FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_LAST_WRITE,
            None,
            None
        )
        # For each change, check to see if it's updating the file we're
        # interested in
        for action, file_M in results:
            full_filename = os.path.join (dirPath, file_M)
            #print file, ACTIONS.get (action, "Unknown")
            if len(full_filename) == len(fileMonitoring) and action == 3:
                #copy to main file
                ...