Unix How-To: File Updates in Linux

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3 pointsabennett5 comments

The python function also has a stat, in os somewhere I believe. If you want to see when these things change -eg, when a file is modified, you can use pyinotify.

It would be a sad day if your programming language didn't have stat.

Inotify is only present if your Linux-kernel is compiled with it turned on. If you want to use it in shell scripts there's inotify-tools (that's the Debian name anyway). Sadly GNU got their grubby fingers in and invented the stupid D-BUS.

In FreeBSD there's kqueue which does a similar job.

Cool re: kqueue, I'll have to check that out. You don't know if there's an equivalent for Solaris 8 by chance?

DBus is in RHEL and Ubuntu, that covers most Linux OSs.

DBus is a publish subscribe mechanism used as a kind of IPC, inotify is a way of registering interest in an inode to avoid having to do filly things like polling a file continually.

No idea about Solaris, but I'm sure there is a file notification system there too.

Not all Kernels are stock

USE="-dbus -hal"

and that's the way I likes it.

Sure, but you know you removed them, so you know you can't use them. Everyone else who didn't can expect them.

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