Newbie - is Windows folder 'watcher' possible?

dfinner at Kollsman.com dfinner at Kollsman.com
Tue Oct 8 09:51:32 EDT 2002


I have written a simple script that reads a Windows directory and, if files are
present, logs the file names into a text file and makes a copy of the file(s)
into another location.  All that works great (and thanks to the Yahoo thread
52317, O'Reilly Python Programming on Win32, and the help files for pointers).

What I'd like to do as an enhancement is to have Python watch a specified
directory and every time a new file is dumped into the directory, do the log and
copy operation.   The folder is used by a 'Distiller' program that converts
various source files into PDFs and I want to monitor use of the directory.  The
files are in the 'Watch' folder only as long as it takes to generate the PDF
then deleted.  For this reason, the 'log and copy' program needs to be right on
top of what's in the folder (i.e. I can't run it once every 5 minutes).

The question: is it possible?  I like to learn to fish so pointers to the
correct modules or resources are appreciated more than actual code.

Watch folder is on a WinNT server.
I'm running Python 2.2 on Win2000

My thanks for any help.  I think I'm going to like this language!

Doug






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