6 Filesystem

6.1 Detecting changes to files

Its sometimes useful to get notified when certain files change so you can perform an action. As an example, I wanted to automatically rebuild the Scribble documentation for Rain whenever I changed the docs. To do this, you can use the watch procedure.

path can either be a directory or a file. If path is a directory then func will run whenever any file directly below path is created/deleted/modified

watch returns immediately. func runs in its own thread.

Note: it wont recurse to sub-directories.

Example:

(watch "/home/pat/projects/rain/docs"

(lambda (x) {scribble --htmls --dest docs docs/rain.scrbl}))

To stop watching use the stop-watching proc:

To stop the watch for the above example:

(stop-watching "/home/pat/projects/rain/docs")