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Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 06:18:03 -0800
References: <511CEEB1.7040303@hoa-project.net>
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
In-Reply-To: <511CEEB1.7040303@hoa-project.net>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] File system watcher/monitoring
From: mike@michaelho.com (Mike Ho)

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Just a quick note, FileSystemWatcher in .NET is actually not recommended =
for use by Microsoft.

It does not guarantee that an event will be raised on every new file or =
file mod in a given folder=85 and it's even less determinstic when =
trying to deal with network share drives.

Microsoft's own developer blogs usually recommend that people roll their =
own polling-based solution instead of depending on FileSystemWatcher =
(googling FileSystemWatcher will yield many many results regarding =
this).

I'm not necessarily saying that the overall idea is without merit=85 but =
it's just that if someone does want to try and implement something like =
this on Windows, they should try and avoid whatever Win32 API calls that =
FileSystemWatcher uses.

--Mike

On Feb 14, 2013, at 6:03 AM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa =
<ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net> wrote:

> Hi internal,
>=20
> A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available =
for almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP =
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 =
extension needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have =
FileSystemWatcher in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready to =
use.
>=20
> By now, if we didn't use these solutions, we should use a finder =
(thanks to RecursiveIteratorIterator and DirectoryIterator in SPL) that =
runs every n seconds and compute a diff with the previous run. This =
solution works fine for a small set of files but it can slow for a big =
one. This is just a tricky solution, not a proper one.
>=20
> Possible domains where it is needed: test, CI, log, file transfering, =
security etc.
>=20
> Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma =
allows it)? or do you want such a feature?
>=20
> Best regards :-).
>=20
> --=20
> Ivan Enderlin
> Developer of Hoa
> http://hoa-project.net/
>=20
> PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
> http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/
>=20
> Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
> http://w3.org/
>=20
>=20
>=20
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>=20


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