Monitoring if a file stopped writing in python

Question

I have a program that keeps writing to a file every second. File writing is happening in a thread parallel to the UI. Due to some hardware issue it stops writing sometimes o

Answer 1

To determine whether the file changes on time in a GUI program, you could use standard tools for your event loop, to run a function every interval seconds e.g., here's how to do it in tkinter:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import logging
import os
import sys
import tkinter
from datetime import datetime
from time import monotonic as timer, localtime

path = sys.argv[1]
interval = 120 # check every 2 minutes

def check(last=[None]):
    mtime = os.path.getmtime(path) # or os.path.getsize(path)
    logging.debug("mtime %s", datetime.fromtimestamp(mtime))
    if last[0] == mtime: #NOTE: it is always False on the first run
        logging.error("file metadata hasn't been updated, exiting..")
        root.destroy() # exit GUI
    else: # schedule the next run
        last[0] = mtime
        root.after(round(1000 * (interval - timer() % interval)), check)


logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG,
                    filename=os.path.splitext(__file__)[0] + ".log",
                    format="%(asctime)-15s %(message)s", datefmt="%F %T")
root = tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw() # hide GUI
root.after(round(1000 * (interval - timer() % interval)), check) # start on boundary
root.mainloop()

You could use supervisord, or systemd, or upstart, etc to respawn your script automatically.

See How to run a function periodically in python.