I'm trying to ensure that a process is generating output (it's supposed to be recording an audio stream). I've got 2 mechanisms to make sure that the recording process is running but recently i lost a few days of recordings when i didn't realize that the process WASN'T WRITING ANY OUTPUT. grrr

So, I'm making a cron that will opendir, and check that at least one file in my "scratch" directory has been modified recently. Thing is, apparently...readdir doesn't report files that are currently being modified.. wha?

here's my code currently:

open DIR, $ScratchDir or die $!;
foreach my $file ( readdir(DIR) ) {
    print "$file\n";
}
[download]

this prints nothing! however, immediately after running that i produce this:

~/cron $ ls -l ScratchDir
total 322944
-rw-r--r--  1 unamechanged  unamechanged  165347328 27 Aug 11:55 filen
+amechanged.mp3
[download]

so see! there's a file in there, what gives? oh and, ahem, it should be noted that this is a Mac

~/cron $ uname -a
Darwin WRUV-Studio.local 7.9.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30
+ 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC  Power Ma
+cintosh powerpc
[download]

who's got my clue? thanks y'all