detegr / rsnotify

Filesystem notifications for Rust

Notify

Cross-platform filesystem notification library for Rust.

Install

[dependencies]
notify = "1"

Notify uses semver, so only major versions break backward compatibility. While Rust hasn't reached 1.0, compatibility breaks through language evolution are ignored and counted as bugfixes; the compatibility is for this API only.

Usage

extern crate notify;

use notify::{RecommendedWatcher, Error, Watcher};

fn main() {
  // Create a channel to receive the events.
  let (tx, rx) = channel();

  // Automatically select the best implementation for your platform.
  // You can also access each implementation directly e.g. PollWatcher.
  let mut w: Result<RecommendedWatcher, Error> = Watcher::new(tx);

  match w {
    Ok(mut watcher) => {
      // Add a path to be watched. All files and directories at that path and
      // below will be monitored for changes.
      watcher.watch(&Path::new("/home/test/notify"));

      // You'll probably want to do that in a loop. The type to match for is
      // notify::Event, look at src/lib.rs for details.
      match rx.recv() {
        _ => println!("Recv.")
      }
    },
    Err(e) => println!("Error")
  }
}

Platforms

• Linux / Android: inotify
• All platforms: polling (only op::WRITE)

Todo

• Windows: ReadDirectoryChangesW
• OS X: FSEvents
• BSD / OS X / iOS: kqueue
• Solaris 11: FEN

Known Bugs

• inotify backend panics when dropped
• polling backend only handles op::WRITEs
• see TODO comments in the code for more

Origins

Inspired by Go's fsnotify, born out of need for cargo watch, and general frustration at the non-existence of C/Rust cross-platform notify libraries.

Written from scratch by Félix Saparelli, and released in the Public Domain.