I am developing my program on Linux, is there a programmatic way to detect when another application creates/copies a file under/to a specific folder. I want to detect the new file as fast as it is created and I would like to process the file.
As far as I researched I can accomplish this using inotify. Are there any better alternatives?
inotify is the proper API provided by the Linux kernel. Your toolkit may have convenience on top of it, e.g. KDirWatch from libkdecore, but that uses inotify internally.
Using API from a toolkit is a good idea when your program is cross-platform.
http://www.highscore.de/boost/dir_monitor.zip on http://en.highscore.de/cpp/boost/asio.html is a cross-platform C++ Boost solution, though I haven't tried it yet.
http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/ASIO-file-monitoring-help-td4645105.html has code using it that is wrong, the fix looks to be to make a few more objects the author assumed could be temporary permanent instead.
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/fanotify.7.html is another option
This is a nice article which sums all methods http://www.lanedo.com/filesystem-monitoring-linux-kernel/
