An ease to use directory and/or file watcher. It keeps track of changes in the file or directory specified and sends notifications of changes to the resource. As of know it uses a short polling approach where it checks the resource stats and sends the notifications based on that. Moving forward I plan on adding a system call mode where it work using system events to check for changes.
Side Note
I may or may not fully commit to system mode if I find it trully beneficial that may be determined by performance and scalability
I need a tool/lib like this for a project I'm working on. I did try to use a different library. However, It wasn't working as I expected it to. It could be skill issues or a case of RTFM, regardless it got me thinking how hard could it be to implement my own with just the features I need instead of an entire library of which I may use only 20% and so OWL was born.
I'm also interested in learning from the process of putting it to together. That is mainly the reason why I want to try and implement a system call version where I rely on events from the kernel to identify changes in resources. I'm not sure at this point if that is possible but I beleieve it is.
At this point usage is very simple. Do keep in mind this is not an stable release therefore the API may change in the future.
// initialize the watcher
w, err := owl.NewWatcher("../sandbox", owl.Options{})
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
for {
// handle events, errors and done channels
select {
case e, open := <-w.Events:
if !open {
return
}
if e.Operation == owl.FileModified {
fmt.Printf("File was modified. %s\n", e.Location)
} else {
fmt.Printf("%v Something else happend to the file\n", e)
}
case err, open := <-w.Errors:
if !open {
return
}
fmt.Println(err)
case _ = <-w.Done:
fmt.Println("Process is done")
return
}
}