Tree-watcher is a tool for monitoring changes in an entire file tree.

The standard fs.watch(dir, callback) only watches for changes in a single directory. Tree-watcher can watch an unlimited amount of directories for changes.

Features include

• Watching subdirs as they are created (so no need to manually add watchers to newly created subdirs of a dir that is already watched)
• Getting the full path of a changed file as a parameter to the `change`` event handler
• Adding event handlers at any time (require("tree-watcher").Watcher is an EventEmitter)
• Throttling change events (tree-watchers keeps track of the event/path combinations that get fired and adds the possibility to throttle these, to prevent a large number of the events firing for a single change)
• filter out directory names that dont need to be watched (by adding a filter function)

warning: watching many directories is no problem, but attaching all the listeners can potentially take some time.

USAGE

var watcher = require("./treewatcher");

watcher = new watcher.Watcher({
    //filter function return true to allow filename, false to disallow
    //gets the filename, not the full path
    //the default is a function that always returns true
    filter: function(filename) {
        return filename.charAt(0) !== ".";
    },
    //set to 0 to prevent throttling
    throttle: 50
});

//the Watcher EventEmitter only emits change events, but the event type fired by fs.watch is passed as the first parameter
//you can alse choose to add the listener inside of the callback for Watcher.watch, to make sure no events are fired before every dir is watched
watcher.on("change", function(event, path, watcher) {
    console.log("something has changed");
});

//the callback is fired when all the (sub)directories are being watched
watcher.watch("C:\\myDir", function(err, watcher) {
    if(err) {
        console.log("ERROR: " + err);
    } else {
        console.log("DONE");
    }
});

//add more directories to watch
watcher.watch("C:\\myOtherDir", function() {
    ...
})