Idea: Directory/File Monitor Change Notification

[bscoles]

Program to monitor a directory or set of directories and simply notify if a file has changed or files have been added. A button or option to indicate that the change has been noted and to start a fresh monitor.

[Crush]

What would you do if a change has been notified? Virus-killers can do this on their own ... or is there any other use for this? How many files/directories must be scanned?

[jgpaiva]

Here's a thread here in the forum that probably would solve your problem: Log Monitor - Great Free Tool for Monitoring Files+Dirs and Acting on Changes

[bscoles]

Crush-
I would be using it to notify others of updated files so that I don't have to go around telling everyone 'check your directory for new files' or relying on them to check for updates. Has nothing to do with viruses or such. I suspect that once past the initial code of the directory structure. That it could easily scale to several directories. If it monitors a directory and it's subdirectories then all I would need is 1. If it didn't do subdirectories then I would need to monitor 6 individual directories.

Back in the 'Old' days when I ran a BBS that received files from a satellite system, I had written a program that did this in order to initiate other actions... zip/unzip, create a message to notify users of file availability & automatically re-distribute files to other BBS's. I was one of the area hubs for fidonet mail & file distribution.  But that was a Dos based environment, I haven't done any windows programming.


jgpaiva-
Thanks, I'll check it out.

[f0dder]

Just remember that update notifications can be flaky with UNC paths (ie., files on a share on a server). Tend to work great otherwise, though.

[Crush]

This program can do all you need (with subdirs): http://www.dirwatcher.com/index.html

[justice]

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/Directory_Monitor_Utility/dirmonitor.html

another one

[rjbull]

Back in the 'Old' days when I ran a BBS that received files from a satellite system, I had written a program that did this in order to initiate other actions...

I immediately thought of John Souvestre's SLEEP.  Ah, the good old days... 

[rjbull]

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/Directory_Monitor_Utility/dirmonitor.html

The author's site is http://www.gibinsoft.net/
They keep a copy of the old freeware version 1.9.5, plus a 19 euro / US$19 set of utilities containing an updated version 2.9:

GiPo@FileUtilities is a set of utilities for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP that provide many useful services:

    * GiPo@MoveOnBoot - copying/moving/renaming/deleting files and folders on the next system boot.
    * GiPo@DirMonitor - monitoring changes in the file system.
    * GiPo@Mount - local folders substitution and local/remote drives mounting.
    * GiPo@Hardlink - UNIX-like (POSIX) hardlinks for NTFS creation.
    * GiPo@ReadTest - checking files and folders for read errors.

Utilities can be integrated into shell.