How to monitor a folder using C++

[vijkrr]

Hi
I want to write a C++ program which has to take input as folder name and a thread should monitor that folder and it has to print the file name which is added into that folder. I'm new to C++ in unix. So plese help me in this. Kindly provide me some good links learn about on how to monitor the particular directory.

[Bazzy]

try using dirent.h
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirent.h
http://www.space.unibe.ch/comp_doc/c_manual/C/FUNCTIONS/funcref.htm#dirent

[kbw]

Check out the File Alteration Manager.

[PanGalactic]

The only portable way I know to do this is to check the mtime of the directory for changes, then rescan the directory every time a change is noticed. That's very inefficient though.

On Linux, there is the inotify(7) API, which makes monitoring directories for new files a snap.

[vijkrr]

I tried with the File Alteration Manager program given in
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi/0650/bks/SGI_Developer/books/IIDsktp_IG/sgi_html/ch08.html#LE15849-PARENT
in that they included fam.h , for that header file i'm getting the following error
Could not open include file<fam.h>.
can u help me in this?

[kbw]

It's possible you don't have FAM installed. You'll need to do that first.

It turned up in the default installation of RedHat 8. I only found it because I was trying to work out why 8 ran so much slower than 7.3. I thought it was horrible. If there's another method, you could try it, but that's what FAM does.