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Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:50:50 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] File system watcher/monitoring
From: ivan.enderlin@hoa-project.net ("Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa")

Hi Victor,

On 15/02/13 12:43, Victor Berchet wrote:
>
> On 02/14/2013 03:03 PM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa wrote:
>> Hi internal,
>>
>> A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring=20
>> available for almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify=20
>> (available in PHP through pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have=20
>> /dev/fsevents (not available in PHP, since we need ioctl to do that=20
>> in pure PHP =97and sudo=97, no C extension needed), on FreeBSD, we hav=
e=20
>> FAM, and on Windows, we have FileSystemWatcher in .NET. All major=20
>> platforms have a solution ready to use.
>>
>> By now, if we didn't use these solutions, we should use a finder=20
>> (thanks to RecursiveIteratorIterator and DirectoryIterator in SPL)=20
>> that runs every n seconds and compute a diff with the previous run.=20
>> 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.
>>
>> Possible domains where it is needed: test, CI, log, file transfering, =

>> 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 :-).
>>
> Ivan,
>
> Everzet has started to build a client side solution[1]
>
> Hopefuly he will have time to update the PR with what is remaining to=20
> do soon[2]
I have read your conversation on Twitter. Everzet uses inotify or a=20
recursiveiterator as a fallback, as suggested in my first mail, but this =

cannot be extended to FSEvents, FAM etc. A solution in pure PHP is not=20
possible for technical reasons (we need ioctl to read from=20
/dev/fsevents, or we need a low-level C program for Windows, BSD etc.).=20
That's my point here :-).
Of course, =93tricky=94 solutions exist on the Web, like the one proposed=
 by=20
Everzet. I did one and you can find many others, but they are=20
=93incomplete=94 or =93unefficient=94 most of the times (note the quotes =
here,=20
it depends of the context of use).

Cheers.

--=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/