Via Noah Gift at O'Reilly, I've just found out about pyinotify a filesystem event listener (for Linux kernels after 2.6.13). BlogMatrix (and hence Onaswarm, etc.) has great interest in this sort of thing since a lot of our code is built around queuing information through the filesystem.

The main issue I have is that, well, it's a little too complicated for what I would consider to be the common use case. After a little thinking, I've made a Pythonic iterator wrapper which I'm going to submit to Sébastien Martini for inclusion in the code base so that people can write code like this:

import pyinotify
for event in pyinotify.watch("/tmp", "/var/tmp", create = True, delete = True):
   print event

I've attached the code to this posting if anyone would like to give it a try. Hmmm ... the attachment isn't working properly, try this.