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

If you're using windows, create this POLL.CMD file

@echo off
:top
xcopy /m /y %1 %2 | find /v "File(s) copied"
timeout /T 1 > nul
goto :top

then you can type "poll dir1 dir2" and it will copy all the files from dir1 to dir2 and check for updates once per second.

The "find" is optional, just to make the console less noisy.

This is not recursive. Maybe you could make it recursive using /e on the xcopy.