Win32: monitoring created or modified files

Question

1) How can I use FindFirstChangeNotification / FindNextChangeNotification + ReadDirectoryChanges to detect specific files that have been created or deleted?

2) Is FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_LAST_WRITE reliable indicator of file changes?

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Application. I have an explicit list of files that can be located in different folders. The contents of the mapping depend on the first file in lsit that actually exists. For this, I want to add an automatic update mechanism.

Thus, I need to detect the created "more important" files, the current file will be modified or deleted.

The list is not long (maybe about a dozen files), so I could poll the files, but for some applications the polling interval should be 50..80 ms, I wonder if the monitoring interface is better ?.

The response time should not exceed 200 ms (not counting any kiosks due to unresponsive disks or high system load), but under ideal conditions, the update should appear “immediately” for the operator-operator, without resorting to a high load on the system.

Answer 1

Monitoring features are a much better and cleaner solution than polling, which in itself will affect performance. But response time cannot be guaranteed - Windows is not RTS.