In my recent project, I have a need to monitor a directory for changes such as a new file created, modified or deleted. Surprisingly, JDK (up to JDK 6) does not have APIs to do that! JDK 7 does support it out of the box but I am stuck with the version 6.
After looking around for an existing solution, I finally found that jNotify seems to fit the need. It supports all the three major platforms (Windows, Linux, and MacOS).The project has not released any update for nearly two years, so it’s a little bit tricky to compile the native code. In this post, I will show you how! (at least on a Ubuntu Server 64bit)
In order to build anything serious on Ubuntu, you should install the package build-essentials
sudo apt-get install build-essentialThen download the source code of jNotify from its homepage. Extract it, open a terminal and issue the command: (assuming that you are at the directory jnotify-native-linux-0.93-src)
cd Release
makeOn ArchLinux 64bit, the compilation will succeed and you will get a libjnotify.so in the same folder. But on my Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, I’ve got this:
/usr/include/asm-generic/fcntl.h:96: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘pid_t’After Googling around I found this thread. Basically, you have to change the file net_contentobjects_jnotify_linux_JNotify_linux.c by moving up the unistd.h up above the sys/time.h. Now issue the command make, the compilation will work as expected.
Happy coding!