CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonwatchdog
John
John

Reputation: 1828

How to use watchdog to monitor whenever a file created or deleted in Python

I am using watchdog in Python to monitor realtime whenever a file is created or deleted.

Following examples, I tried with the following:

import time
from watchdog.observers import Observer
from watchdog.events import FileSystemEventHandler

class MyHandler(FileSystemEventHandler):
    def on_created(self, event):
        print("File is created!")

event_handler = MyHandler()
observer = Observer()
observer.schedule(event_handler, path='C:/daten/dog.txt', recursive=False)

observer.start()

try:
    while True:
        time.sleep(1)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    observer.stop()

observer.join()

Of course, the file path='C:/daten/dog.txt' does not exist when this script begins to run. But I still get error messages as 

FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified.

Why it's telling me it cannot find the file specified at the first place. I need it running to watch for the creation of the file after all.

Update: Now I understand that watchdog is for monitoring a folder rather than a file.

Is there a similar package for monitoring a file or is it just better done by while and sleep statements together?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2830

Answers (1)

Masklinn
Masklinn

Reputation: 42207

Why it's telling me it cannot find the file specified at the first place.

Because the path you give to watchdog is where it's going to hook itself to listen for events.

You can't watch a file and expect its creation event to be recorded. File creation events are posted on the parent directory, so that is what you should be watching.

In fact I don't know that watching a specific file makes any sense with watchdog, its tagline is

Directory monitoring made easy with

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions