Re: Emacs inotify support?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> From: joakim@verona.se
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, antoine.levitt@gmail.com,
>>         lennart.borgman@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:28:45 +0200
>>
>> One way to look at it is auto-revert-mode for directories visited with
>> dired. Something other than Emacs is changing the contents of a
>> directory and I would like dired to notice. This can be achieved in a
>> number of ways, but the way I had in mind is an inotify handler in
>> Emacs, that would insert some kind of event in the event stream, so one
>> could bind a handler to it. This should be portable across platforms
>> with different filesystem notification schemes, and consistent with
>> Emacs behavior in general.
>
> I can hardly imagine that using inotify is more portable than looking
> at the time stamp of the directory (which works even on Windows, if
> you have NTFS).
>
> But maybe I didn't understand what you were trying to say.


I do not know how inotify works, but the corresponding function in w32
will send a notification when a file has changed. It is not more
portable, but it allows changes in the direcotry from outside of Emacs
to be handled rather similar to those from within Emacs.