Blocking code

[eric.frederich]

I am trying to write something that will watch directories without
poling them.
This is what FAM is fore.  Gamin is a re-implementation of FAM and it
has python bindings.

The problem is that when I call handle_one_event() it blocks until
there is an event to handle.
Pressing Ctrl-C does nothing here.
This seems to be the behavior of FAM so it was re-implemented in
Gamin.
I looked at another set of bindings for FAM in Java.
It came with an example that watched a directory for changes.  They
basically put the code that blocks in another thread and accepted
input on a second thread waiting for the user to press q and it would
kill the blocking thread.

I don't know how to do something like this in Python, I have never
used threads and I'm not sure if thats the way to go.

Someone else that complained about the blocking behavior of those
calls said that he found a solution since he was using OCaml.
Apparently OCaml has a way to say that you're entering a block of code
that blocks and you can still exit using Ctrl-C.
I don't think anything like this exists in Python does it?

So, my question here is.... How from Python can I call code that
blocks without losing the ability to use Ctrl-C?

Here is the code that is impenetrable to Ctrl-C.  You need to kill it
with another terminal....

#!/usr/bin/env python

import gamin
import sys

directory = sys.argv[1]

def callback(path, event):
    print "Got callback: %s, %s" % (path, event)

mon = gamin.WatchMonitor()
mon.watch_directory(directory, callback)
mon.event_pending()

while True:
    mon.handle_one_event()