I've been tasked with writing a daemon that will watch for new files in a given directory. When one appears, it will attempt to flock (non-blocking) the file. When it attains the lock, it will process it and delete it. (Flocking is ok because that's the agreed-upon API between the daemon and the application(s) that will be depositing files in this directory.)

My first question is if there's anything on CPAN for this. It's going to run on Solaris, so Win32::ChangeNotify isn't going to help. filechange.monitor also isn't helpful because it's part of a larger project. Mostly, I'm interested in prior art regarding the daemonic part.

The second question is how to test something like this. The daemon is going to run in the background, so should I just kick it off, run tests against it, verify its logs, then tear it down (a-la Apache::Test)? What have others done in this situation?

My wife's blog

In reply to Testing filesystem monitor by dragonchild

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