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From: ericblake AT comcast DOT net (Eric Blake)
To: "Paul J. Lucas" <pauljlucas AT mac DOT com>, cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: stat(2) of a directory
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 02:45:55 +0000
Message-Id: <030520060245.29893.440A50E3000BB933000074C522007507440A050E040D0C079D0A@comcast.net>
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> 	Under *nix, I can use stat(2) of a directory to know when its
> 	contents have changed (file added or deleted from it).
> 
> 	Under cygwin, this doesn't work because a directory's
> 	modification time doesn't change when its contents change.
> 
> 	Any recommendations as to how to monitor a directory to know
> 	when its contents change under cygwin?

On Win9x, this is basically impossible, since Windows does not
provide that capability (try it - touch . is a noop on cygwin on
Win9x).  On Windows NT, the capability exists, but since
Windows itself is not doing the timestamp update, it would
severely slow cygwin down to open the directory and touch the
directory's timestamp on every open or unlink, just to implement
this requirement of POSIX/SUSv3 properly.  It has been suggested
in the past that perhaps a 'CYGWIN=posixly_correct' option
be added that does all these slower corner cases, but no one
has bothered to implement it.

-- 
Eric Blake

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