Hello PhillyR,

With the ls utility from GnuWin tools you can use ls -i to get the inode of the monitored directory. If the user subsequently renames the directory, its inode number remains unchanged, allowing you to identify the directory and retrieve its new name.¹ Here is some proof-of-concept code (minus error checking!):

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $dir   =  'foo';
my $ls    =  (grep { /\s+$dir$/ } `ls -il`)[0];
   $ls    =~ /^\s*(\d+)/;
my $inode =  $1;

print "$dir --> $inode ";

rename $dir, 'bar';

$ls =  (grep { /^\s*$inode\s+/ } `ls -il`)[0];
$ls =~ /:\d{2}\s+(.*)$/;

print "--> $1\n";
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Output:

13:09 >perl 1076_SoPW.pl
foo --> 7318349394599033 --> bar

13:09 >
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(Tested on an NTFS file system under Windows 8.1, 64-bit.)

Hope that helps,

¹See this discussion.

I'm really baffled by how your example works, as NTFS doesn't have inode numbers?

(See the output from stat & lstat, where the inode number is always 0.)

From what I can tell by looking at the ls.c (from the GnuWin project), it (same.c) uses the st_ino field returned by stat:

#define SAME_INODE(Stat_buf_1, Stat_buf_2) \
  ((Stat_buf_1).st_ino == (Stat_buf_2).st_ino \
   && (Stat_buf_1).st_dev == (Stat_buf_2).st_dev)

static bool
dev_ino_compare (void const *x, void const *y)
{
  struct dev_ino const *a = x;
  struct dev_ino const *b = y;
  return SAME_INODE (*a, *b) ? true : false;
}
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Which is (in my machine) always 0.

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Hello i'm baffled too (but learned new word: baffled) because i knew inode was always 0 on windows.. but effectively the version suggested by Athanasius, ie gnuwin32 return some number while unxutils return 0.


>touch test.txt
>
>
>which ls.exe
>C:\various_stuffs\bin\UnxUtils\usr\local\wbin\ls.exe
>
>ls -il test.txt
      0 -rw-rw-rw-   1 user     group           0 Nov 13 09:57 test.tx
+t

>C:\some_path\GnuWin32\bin\ls.exe -il test.txt
>3377699722053632 -rw-rw-rw-  1 lt 0 0 2014-11-13 09:57 test.txt
>
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Can someone tell us if we can use reliably this inode number?

Thanks
L*

There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.

Documentation for Windows API functions FindFirstChangeNotification and FindNextChangeNotification which are wrapped up by the module states:

"these functions do not indicate the actual change"

The documentation suggests ReadDirectoryChangesW be used to "retrieve information about the specific change". But that doesn't help your case unless you can monitor the parent directory instead, and I can't find a Perl module that wraps up ReadDirectoryChangesW in any case. You can probably call ReadDirectoryChangesW directly using Win32::API if that solves a problem for you.

perl ReadDirectoryChanges -> Win32::ReadDirectoryChangesW  [id://366446|Win32::ReadDirectoryChangesW]

my $dir = $ARGV[0];

my $notify = Win32::ChangeNotify->new($dir, 0, 'FILE_NAME LAST_WRITE S
+IZE') or die "Unable to create notification for $dir\n";
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derp, completely missed the point of the user changing the name of the dir.