watching a directory in ruby

Question

We have an application that needs to process incoming files that are dropped into a directory. I am looking for the best way to do this.

We have been using a loopin

Answer 1

There's also the tiny filewatcher rubygem. The gem has no dependencies, contains no platform specific code and simply detects updates, delitions and additions by polling.

require 'filewatcher'

FileWatcher.new(["directory"]).watch() do |filename, event|
  if(event == :changed)
    puts "File updated: " + filename
  end
  if(event == :delete)
    puts "File deleted: " + filename
  end
  if(event == :new)
    puts "Added file: " + filename
  end
end