In the UNIX world the common tool is FAM -- File Allocation Monitor.
This is a daemon that will report filesystem changes to clients.
There is a Python interface to libfam called "Python FAM" here:
http://python-fam.sourceforge.net/
It looks mature, but I have never used it.There are also some alternatives to FAM, but I don't remember the names of them right now. Yours, Noah -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
