[Tutor] Invoking python script

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 17 February 2013 15:57, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com> wrote:
> On 17/02/13 09:14, Brajesh pant wrote:
>>
>> Actually i want to  build a utility such that a when a file or folder
>
>> is copied i want to automatically run my python script ..
>>
>
> And this is a far different thing because you specifically want to monitor
> the file-system regardless of how the files get moved.
> This is very dependent on the OS and even the file-system. For example with
> a journalling file-system it will be much easier to do this than with the
> old DOS FAT based system or even older Unix systems like ext2.
> And I don;t know of any Python modules that would help directly, I suspect
> you need to get down 'n dirty with the OS itself.
>
> I'll be interested to see what other folks suggest on this one.

I would suggest watchdog:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/watchdog
There are other packages that do this but watchdog is the only one
that I have used.

This is a Python package that enables you to watch for changes in a
directory. I've used it on Linux but it claims to work on Windows, OSX
and BSD as well. Using this you can run any Python code you like when
a change occurs.

The way it works is that you have a script that imports and uses the
watchdog module. You run that script telling it to watch a particular
folder and while it is running it will be notified of any changes and
will run the code that you specify for each event.


Oscar