monitoring directory on another pc

Question

I want to monitor a folder located on another computer using the FileSystemWatcher.

How can i do that?

Answer 1

Suppose, your computer A wants to observe a directory on the hard drive of computer B. Here are some ways to achieve this:

• Have computer A mount the remote file system on B using SMB, NFS or some other network file system protocol. Then your application running on A should be able to:

  • use a Java 7 WatchService to get file system events on the directory,

  • in Java 6 and earlier, poll the directory's modification date etc to see when it changes, or

  • use a native program or library to read Linux inotify(7) events or the Windows equivalent.

• If you can't mount B's file system on A, you need to implement and run some kind of remote service on B that can be queried by a client application running on A. There are many possible ways to do this.