Strategy/ Advice for How to Best Attack this Problem?

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Saran Ahluwalia <ahlusar.ahluwalia at gmail.com> writes:
>> cross-platform...
>> * Monitors a folder for files that are dropped throughout the day
>
> I don't see a cross-platform way to do that other than by waking up and
> scanning the folder every so often (once a minute, say).  The Linux way
> is with inotify and there's a Python module for it (search terms: python
> inotify).  There might be comparable but non-identical interfaces for
> other platforms.

All too often, "cross-platform" means probing for one option, then
another, then another, and using whichever one you can. On Windows,
there's FindFirstChangeNotification and ReadDirectoryChanges, which
Tim Golden wrote about, and which I coded up into a teleporter for
getting files out of a VM automatically:

http://timgolden.me.uk/python/win32_how_do_i/watch_directory_for_changes.html
https://github.com/Rosuav/shed/blob/master/senddir.py

ChrisA