I have not found a package that captures open
and close
events on Windows. As others have mentioned, pyinotify, is an excellent option for Linux based operating systems.
Since I wasn't able to watch for the closed event, I settled for the modified event. It's very much an 'after the fact' type of solution (ie. I can't pause until I see a file is closed). But, this has worked surprisingly well.
I've used the watchdog package. The code below is from their sample implementation and watches the current directory if you don't pass a path on the command line, otherwise it watches the path you pass.
Example call: python test.py
or python test.py C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop
import sys
import time
import logging
from watchdog.observers import Observer
from watchdog.events import LoggingEventHandler
if __name__ == "__main__":
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO,
format='%(asctime)s - %(message)s',
datefmt='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
path = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else '.'
event_handler = LoggingEventHandler()
observer = Observer()
observer.schedule(event_handler, path, recursive=True)
observer.start()
try:
while True:
time.sleep(1)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
observer.stop()
observer.join()
This code will show you when files are created, modified, deleted or renamed/moved. You can filter by just modified by watching for the on_modified
event.