dmon is a tiny C library that monitors changes in a directory. It provides a unified solution to multiple system APIs that exist for each OS. It can also monitor directories recursively.
- Windows:
ReadDirectoryChangesWbackend. Tested with Windows10 SDK + Visual Studio 2019 - Linux:
inotifybackend. Tested with gcc-7.4/clang-6, ubuntu 18.04 LTS - MacOS:
FSEventsbackend. Tested with MacOS-10.14 clang 10
You just have to include the file and use it's functions. It is also compatible with C++ code. Backslashes in Windows paths are also converted to '/' for portability.
#define DMON_IMPL
#include "dmon.h"
static void watch_callback(dmon_watch_id watch_id, dmon_action action, const char* rootdir,
const char* filepath, const char* oldfilepath, void* user)
{
// receive change events. type of event is stored in 'action' variable
}
int main()
{
dmon_init();
dmon_watch("/path/to/directory", watch_callback, DMON_WATCHFLAGS_RECURSIVE, NULL);
// wait ...
dmon_deinit();
return 0;
}For more information and how to customize functionality, see dmon.h
To build on linux, link with pthread:
gcc test.c -lpthread -o test
To build on MacOS, link with CoreServices and CoreFoundation:
clang test.c -framework CoreFoundation -framework CoreServices -lpthread -o test
There is this other file dmon_extra.h that you can include optionally after dmon.h for linux backend.
There are two APIs that are introduced in that header, dmon_watch_add and dmon_watch_rm in which you can add/remove
sub-directories to currently watched directory. This can be useful in cases where there are large set of changes happening
on linux backend and you won't get all the events, because of some drawbacks of the inotify backend. So, by disabling DMON_WATCHFLAGS_RECURSIVE and using these functions to manually handle directory recursion, you can workaround those issues.
Copyright 2019 Sepehr Taghdisian. All rights reserved.
https://github.com/septag/dmon
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