Thanks all, for your help. As an OLD unix type, I only thought of solving the problem in that domain. With your pointers, I learned just enough Applescript to call perl from a Folder Action. I have only done "date >>/tmp/timestame" so far, but that proves the process. I also will try to load and use the IO::Kqueue package. That looks like just the ticket for a perl-only approach. Again, thanks. --Linn ------------------------------ Greetings. On my Mac OS X machine, I would like to drag a file to a folder and as it is dropped in, to wake up my perl script. My first attempt was to create a named pipe and have my script waiting on an open function. This worked great for something like cat somefile >mynamedpipe but unfortunately, the application I wanted to export from would not write to the pipe. It needed to delete it and write a normal file. So now I am looking at alternatives. It would be easy to modify the script to process some file that has been written or dropped into a directory, but I would like to control it with something more elegant than polling the directory on a sleep timer. I searched somewhat throught CPAN but didn't see anything initially. Any ideas? Thanks.

In reply to How to do a blocking readdir or similar by bigcreeklinn

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