Claudio Grondi wrote: > After connecting a drive to the system (via USB > or IDE) I would like to be able to see within seconds > if there were changes in the file system of that drive > since last check (250 GB drive with about four million > files on it). > > How to accomplish this? (best if providing > directly a Python receipe for it :-) > Do available file systems have something like > archive attribute assigned to the root directory > of the drive? > I suppose not. Am I right?
On Linux there is the FAM (File Alteration Module) for this, as long as I know. Maybe Python has a wrapper/binding for it. > I ask this question having Microsoft Windows 2000 > and Windows proprietary NTFS file system in mind, > but I am also interested to know it about Linux or > Unix file systems. As long as I know, on Windows there are a few specific "hooks" to perform such a task. They are provided by the MS API for the NTFS/HPFS file systems. I do not think Python implements anything so "low level", anyway. Check the docu to be sure. > I know, that looking for the archive attribute of the > top directories doesn't help when the change > happened to files somewhere deeper in the > hierarchy of directories. Right. It does not help. Consider this: if are accessing a network file system, you can intercepts the calls to the virtualization layer (NFS or NetBIOS). Most likely, Python can support you in performing this task. HTH ----------------------------------- Alessandro Bottoni -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
