Hi,

An alternative approach might be to:

- Add a timer to your app.
- At each interval your app would check the last modified time i.e.
file.lastModified() to find out if it has changed.
- If there is a change it would notify all listeners.
- The listener would then read the appended text. If the text is
delimited you could use the substring method.

Otherwise your byte method looks fine to.

--
Fahd Shariff
http://www.fahdshariff.cjb.net
"Let the code do the talking... "

Hopefully you really only want to read bytes. For any data type
which is longer than one byte you may run into the problem that
the new data ends in the middle of an item (int, char, etc).
This happens if you do not have 100% control over the output
buffering of the application which writes your file. Consequently
you must do your own buffering when reading to handle incomplete data
items at the end of the buffer. A likely trap is char data, because
some encodings are more than one byte long.

Sometimes the scheme you describe cannot be avoided, but if at
all possible, I would try to redirect or duplicate the output
of the program which generates the data so that the application
we are talking about can just read the data. If you are on a UNIX
like system, pipes, named pipes, tee come to mind. In general,
sockets are always an option.

 Harald.

You can check the "fileaccessor" module of http://geosoft.no/software
which does exactly this.

The moudle is generic, so it checks the lastModified tag only. What
you suggest is more specific as you imply knowledge of *how* your
source file changes with time. This might be important if the file is
large and/or performance is extremely important.