Directory monitoring on NTFS

Ruby JRuby
1

Hello all,

I am in a situation where I need to monitor a directory for changes
(Basically only when files are created in it) on Windows (NTFS
filesystem) from a long running jruby script.

After a bit of searching I found
GitHub - chef-boneyard/win32-changejournal: A Ruby interface for monitoring events related to files and directories on NTFS using change journals. however this uses a C
Extension and requires the win32 gem etc.

Since I am going to be using JRuby I thought there must be a java based
solution and it looks like Java 7 got a “WatchService” interface.

This looks good but before I delve into the “J” in JRuby I just wanted
to see if anyone had already faced this question and had any other ideas

cheers

Jeff

2

I would go with the Java 7 solution over a native C extension. Using
Java
directly from JRuby is usually a smoother path than working with C
extensions, plus if you use the Java solution your code should work on
any platform and wouldn’t be a Windows specific solution in case you
ever
needed something different in the future.

Joe

3

I’m using the Java 7 watch service for a small little app at work and it
really didn’t take too long to get it working. These blog posts summed
up
what it does pretty simply:

http://java.dzone.com/articles/introducing-nio2-jsr-203-part-2

I know that Headius mentioned JNotify some time ago as an option, and if
you don’t want to use Java 7 for it, this is probably another good
option
that you might be able to: http://jnotify.sourceforge.net/

…
and with a little bit of googling, someone might have already wrapped it
in
JRuby: GitHub - netzpirat/jruby-notify: JRuby-Notify is an thin wrapper around the JNotify library

-Nick K.

4

Thanks very much all.

Easy to find when you know the correct search terms.

cheers

Jeff