Detecting changes in a txt file-CodePudding

I am a beginner python programmer and I am wondering if there is any way to detect a change in a txt file on windows. Any suggestion is appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

There are many ways to go with it :

You can for example check the last modification date of the file every few seconds with os.path.getmtime(path), when the date change you know the file was edited.
You can also use some form of checksum (generate md5 hash of a file) on the file and check every few seconds if the checksum change (can get slow on big files since the checksum require to read the entire file)
You can also listen for signals send by windows directly and execute an event handler when you get a signal, this is harder to implement but by far the cleanest way to do it. (Edit, this seems to be what @martin kamau suggest in his answer)
Probably many more way that I can't think of right now...

CodePudding user response：

To watch for file changes in a file,

import time import fcntl import os import signal

filename = "nameofthefile"

def handler(signum, frame): print "File %s modified" % (FNAME,)

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