Just a quick note, FileSystemWatcher in .NET is actually not recommended for 
use by Microsoft.

It does not guarantee that an event will be raised on every new file or file 
mod in a given folder… and it's even less determinstic when trying to deal with 
network share drives.

Microsoft's own developer blogs usually recommend that people roll their own 
polling-based solution instead of depending on FileSystemWatcher (googling 
FileSystemWatcher will yield many many results regarding this).

I'm not necessarily saying that the overall idea is without merit… but it's 
just that if someone does want to try and implement something like this on 
Windows, they should try and avoid whatever Win32 API calls that 
FileSystemWatcher uses.

--Mike

On Feb 14, 2013, at 6:03 AM, Ivan Enderlin @ Hoa 
<ivan.ender...@hoa-project.net> wrote:

> Hi internal,
> 
> A missing feature in PHP is a file system watcher/monitoring available for 
> almost all platforms. On Linux, we have inotify (available in PHP through 
> pecl/inotify), on Mac OS X, we have /dev/fsevents (not available in PHP, 
> since we need ioctl to do that in pure PHP —and sudo—, no C extension 
> needed), on FreeBSD, we have FAM, and on Windows, we have FileSystemWatcher 
> in .NET. All major platforms have a solution ready to use.
> 
> By now, if we didn't use these solutions, we should use a finder (thanks to 
> RecursiveIteratorIterator and DirectoryIterator in SPL) that runs every n 
> seconds and compute a diff with the previous run. This solution works fine 
> for a small set of files but it can slow for a big one. This is just a tricky 
> solution, not a proper one.
> 
> Possible domains where it is needed: test, CI, log, file transfering, 
> security etc.
> 
> Is it possible to have such a feature landing in PHP (core if karma allows 
> it)? or do you want such a feature?
> 
> Best regards :-).
> 
> -- 
> Ivan Enderlin
> Developer of Hoa
> http://hoa-project.net/
> 
> PhD. student at DISC/Femto-ST (Vesontio) and INRIA (Cassis)
> http://disc.univ-fcomte.fr/ and http://www.inria.fr/
> 
> Member of HTML and WebApps Working Group of W3C
> http://w3.org/
> 
> 
> 
> --
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