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Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:03:29 +0100
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Subject: File system watcher/monitoring
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

Hi internal,

A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available=20
for almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP=20
through pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have /dev/fsevents (not available =

in PHP, since we need ioctl to do that in pure PHP =97and sudo=97, no C=20
extension needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have=20
FileSystemWatcher in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready to u=
se.

By now, if we didn't use these solutions, we should use a finder (thanks =

to RecursiveIteratorIterator and DirectoryIterator in SPL) that runs=20
every n seconds and compute a diff with the previous run. This solution=20
works fine for a small set of files but it can slow for a big one. This=20
is just a tricky solution, not a proper one.

Possible domains where it is needed: test, CI, log, file transfering,=20
security etc.

Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma=20
allows it)? or do you want such a feature?

Best regards :-).

--=20
Ivan Enderlin
Developer of Hoa
http://hoa-project.net/

PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/

Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
http://w3.org/