pyfsevents 0.1

Low level interface to FSEvents primitives

Contents

• Introduction

• Installation

• License

• Requirements

• Limitations

• Module Documentation

  • callback signatures

Introduction

pyfsevents is a C extension providing a Python interface for Mac OS X 10.5 and later which allows monitoring for file system events, using FSEvents.

pyfsevents uses a callback mechanism: see Module Documentation.

Installation

python setup.py install

License

Distributed under the terms of the MIT License.

Requirements

Mac OS X >= 10.5 Leopard

Limitations

Thread-unsafe: CFRunLoop’s and Python threads do not quite interact well when put together :)

Module Documentation

pyfsevents uses a callback mechanism.

It provides two functions:

• registerfd(fd, callback[, mask])

• registerpath(path, callback)

to register objects to monitor.

After registration, listen() should be called to wait for events. The call is blocking: callbacks are fired on events.

stop() is available to stop the listen() call. stop() should be called from a different thread.

Please see examples/ for use cases of the extension.

callback signatures

The callback arguments passed to register* functions will be fired on events. These callback functions should be functions callable with two arguments, as listen will call these functions with two arguments:

• For File descriptors, registerfd callbacks will be passed (fd, mask) arguments:

  fd

  file descriptor which changed and fired the callback.

  mask

  the POLLIN / POLLOUT mask, similar to the select.poll module.

• For FSEvents, registerpath callbacks will be passed (path, recursive) arguments:

  path

  the path where the event occurred.

  recursive

  a boolean: if True, the caller should check recursively the directory tree for changes, and not only the specified directory.