Use fs.watch() instead of fs.watchFile()

[nfarina]

I often use fs_usage to monitor what apps are misbehaving on my system when my battery life seems to be running down faster than usual. And I've noticed that jitter will cause a lot of repeated filesystem activity when it's running, which for me is always.

I believe this is because jitter uses fs.watchFile(), which is polling-based on the Mac.

Can jitter be made to use fs.watch() instead? This is what coffee --watch uses and is the only reason I can't use jitter!

[nfarina]

OK, now that I've tried to add support for this myself, I am starting to understand why fs.watch isn't used. It doesn't even generate change notifications on my machine (OS X 10.8.2).

I'd still be curious to know if it's possible! Closing this issue in the meantime.

[TrevorBurnham]

Yeah, fs.watch is better than fs.watchFile in some ways (mainly, Windows support and less system resource usage), but also has some unfortunate inconsistencies. Continuing to use fs.watchFile in Jitter was an intentional decision: Since coffee -cw uses fs.watch, this gives CoffeeScript devs a choice between two imperfect options.

CoffeeScript uses some hacks to make fs.watch work reasonably well; see http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/command.html. Also see much discussion at the CoffeeScript issue tracker, e.g. jashkenas/coffeescript#1846.

[nfarina]

Oy vey, what a cluster. Looks like the only thing to do is wait for Node to deliver on fs.watch() which is looking like a very long-term project.

Ah well, we switched back to Jitter for its many other benefits, guess I can live with some file-polling for a while yet!

On Nov 27, 2012, at 8:08 AM, Trevor Burnham notifications@github.com wrote:

Yeah, fs.watch is better than fs.watchFile in some ways (mainly, Windows support and less system resource usage), but also has some unfortunate inconsistencies. Continuing to use fs.watchFile in Jitter was an intentional decision: Since coffee -cw uses fs.watch, it gives CoffeeScript developers a choice between two imperfect options.

CoffeeScript uses some hacks to make fs.watch work reasonably well; see http://coffeescript.org/documentation/docs/command.html. Also see much discussion at the CoffeeScript issue tracker, e.g. jashkenas/coffeescript#1846.

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