Re: How can I detect a disk file changed?

From:

"Scott McPhillips [MVP]" <org-dot-mvps-at-scottmcp>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.mfc

Date:

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:37:18 -0500

Message-ID:

<uOW3nY0WHHA.4860@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl>

fiveight wrote:

I am working on a MDI text editor program.Now I have a problem.If I use
another editor(e.g. UtraEdit) to edit a text file opened by my program
already,how can I editor program detect this text file has been changed?
From MSDN,I find "Change Journals" technology can do this,but it need
NTFS file system and Windows 2000,Is there another method can do
this?Thanks your time!

There are two ways provided by APIs. These work with all file systems.

FindFirstChangeNotification/FindNextChangeNotification can be used in a
loop to detect changes to specified file(s). One disadvantage of these
APIs is that they do not tell you what file changed, so you then have to
run a directory scan to figure that out.

ReadDirectoryChangesW returns a list of file names with more information
about the way in which each changed.

Both approaches suspend the caller (you) until there is a result
available, so you will probably need to use a worker thread to watch for
the changes.

--
Scott McPhillips [VC++ MVP]