Yes I did notice that you could turn the atime off so it's reliable.
Luckily enough I managed to get my hands on the long lost Win32::AdvNotify package which you can find at http://idnopheq.perlmonk.org/perl/packages.

I then wrote up a little script (see below) that tells you when a change occurs, what type of change it is and what file/folder was affected - it's simply grand !!!
Thanks for your input and here's my code :
NB: you need Win32::API and Data::Dumper as well as the Win32::AdvNotify packages.
use strict;

use Data::Dumper;
use Win32::AdvNotify qw (Yes No All);


my $obj = new Win32::AdvNotify() or 
   die ("Can't create AdvNotify object");

(my $thread=$obj->StartThread(Directory=>"d:\\brossad",Filter=>All,
             WatchSubtree=>Yes)) 
or die ("Can't start thread.");

$thread->EnableWatch() || die "Problem starting EnableWatch()\n";

while (!$obj->Wait(200)) # time in milliseconds
{
print ".";#wait and see
}

my @data;
my $ret = $obj->Read(\@data);
print Dumper(@data);

# very important line - don't forget it
$thread->Terminate();

$obj->Free;

[download]

In reply to Re: Re: smart way of scanning hard drive for file & folder changes by Foggy Bottoms
in thread smart way of scanning hard drive for file & folder changes by Foggy Bottoms

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.