[fpc-pascal] Watching for file change

[Henry Vermaak]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 08:08:20PM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Henry Vermaak wrote:
> >On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 12:32:14AM +0100, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> >>On 2014-04-11 20:06, Krzysztof wrote:
> >>>idea how to do this in thread loop but maybe FPC has OS solution
> >>As the others have said, the OS solutions are very version/distro
> >>dependent - especially under Linux which changes underlying
> >>functionality every 6 months or so (so damn annoying).
> >
> >No, the linux solution isn't distro dependent, since it's in the kernel.
> >inotify came in 2005-ish to deprecate dnotify, but even dnotify still
> >exists (read the man page for fcntl).  The kernel guys are pretty
> >serious about not breaking userspace interfaces.
> 
> I've just been running a kernel build and note that there are explicit
> dnotify and inotify options, so what's built in is very much at the
> discretion of the distro maintainers.

Almost everything in the kernel is configurable at build time,
obviously.  I've never come across a kernel without inotify/dnotify,
even for old embedded ARM CPUs I've worked with (I guess no-one wants to
waste power scanning directories and fstat-ing all the time).  Distros
usually build pretty full featured kernels, so I'd be surprised to see a
distro without it.