Fellow monks, I wrote a small inefficient perl script that checks to see if the time has changed on the /var/log/httpd/access_log file. If the file time is the same it prints a period. Once the file is "touch"ed by anything and the time changes, the script prints an "x". Eventually, I want to move to a specific response instead of an "x". The file uses 12% of cpu process because of its while loop nature. Is there a better way to do this? 
#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Testing to see if file changes.\n";

$listing = `ls -al access_log`;
@fields = split /" "/,$listing;

foreach (@fields) {
    if (/[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]/) {
       $status = $&;
       print "Status is :",$status,"\n"; }
    else {
     print "Didn't find anything.\n";
    }
}
@fields = split /:/, $status;
$hours = @fields[0];
$minutes = @fields[1];
print "hours :",$hours,"\n";
print "minutes :",$minutes,"\n";

$hours2 = $hours; 
$minutes2 = $minutes;
@fields = ();

while (1) {
while ($hours == $hours2 && $minutes == $minutes2)  {
    $listing = `ls -al access_log`;
    @fields = split /" "/,$listing;

    foreach (@fields) {
    if (/[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]/) {
       $status = $&;
 }
    else {
#      print "Didn't find anything suckker.\n";
    }
  }
    @fields = split/:/,$status;
    $hours = @fields[0];
    $minutes=@fields[1];
    @fields= ();
    print "."; # meaning the time is the still the same
}
    $hours2 = $hours;
    $minutes2 = $minutes;    
    print "x";  # meaning the time has changed; file touched
}

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In reply to Perl process to constantly detect the time change of a file? by blackcode6

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