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Are there any simple ways to run a PHP script when a file is added to a specific directory?

On linux there are perfect tools for this like inotify/dnotify, can't find any for Windows.

If I run a PHP script that loops infinitely - will that make a significant impact on cpu performance (if all it does is check folder for contents)?

I read that Win32::ChangeNotify could be used, but I'm a noob in Perl, so I have no idea how to set it up.

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The easiest way to manage this would be to create a cron job that runs your script every minute (or however often you wish to check).

Edit - Just read the post again, and it hit me that you're using Windows. I suppose you can use Scheduled Tasks to do this.

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Use of cron for such tasks (or whatever scheduling mechanism Windows gives) is both ugly and rather inefficient. Because a) you are periodically (and frequently) burning cycles for nothing -- there are no files to process most of the time; b) when the files do appear, the delay in their processing is, on average, one half of the cron-job's period. The right way is finding the mechanism the asker is seeking -- the program starts and is initialized, asks the OS to notify it of certain events and goes to sleep (and can be paged-out), until woken up by the kernel.
@MikhailT. Your comment makes sense, but that seems like it would be difficult to implement, are there command-line utilities for that?
@Artur, sorry, I'm not a Windows man. But there are cross-platform event-libraries (libevent, libev), which may have been ported to Windows already. For more, ask a question :)

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