Interesting issue

[kduke]

Jim

I think it runs in both Windows and UNIX. There a lot of similar products. Most look at file size.

Kim.

[JDionne]

Jim

I think it runs in both Windows and UNIX. There a lot of similar products. Most look at file size.

Kim.

unfortunatly they all need budget money
looks like im going back to dos hehehehehe

[shawn_ramsey]

I would just write a Perl script to do the monitoring. I personally prefer having the source system drop a flag or trigger file but you could easaily build a script that watches the size until it stops growing then try to open the file.

Shawn

[kcbland]

I cautioned you about watching the file size change. You have to be concerned if the feeding process is slow or stalls, your file may not grow and your comparison falsely triggers that the file is done.

Control-M is an enterprise scheduling tool that can run processes on Unix and NT servers. It has file watching capability that can trigger when a file appears, but again, it has the same limitations for file appearance detection. My current client uses Control-M and we inside on "ready" files being watched, never the physical data file.

[vmcburney]

We had a similar problem, files being sent by ftp from many sources, DataStage waiting for them to arrive.. We made it a requirement that all files were written to a landing directory and the ftp script was responsible for moving them to a waiting directory. While the ftp may take many minutes to finish a Unix mv command is instantaneous. So when the file arrives in the waiting directory it is ready to process.

[Teej]

We had a similar problem, files being sent by ftp from many sources, DataStage waiting for them to arrive.. We made it a requirement that all files were written to a landing directory and the ftp script was responsible for moving them to a waiting directory. While the ftp may take many minutes to finish a Unix mv command is instantaneous. So when the file arrives in the waiting directory it is ready to process.

Excellent idea!

My idea involves the time stamp of the last update for that file. You know, checking the last inode modification? I never done something like this before, but this is a guarantee method of determining whether the file is last TOUCHED. Not just updated, read, or whatever. Touched. Of course, this would require some serious control of that directory's content so that no passerby could simply do a "cat [filename]" and screwing up the inode timestamp.

-T.J.

[chulett]

T.J. -

Back when I was on Tru64, my DBA liked to use "fuser" to help tell if a file was 'done' being ftp'd. If possible, we'd prefer the use of a semaphore file or Vince's rename trick (if we woulda thunk of it!), but for those times when we had absolutely no control over the source system or what they were willing to send or do, he used fuser to tell if a process had the file open. That's what I remember, anyways... you may want to check it out.

[Rahul]

I believe enterprise schedulers are available for almost all flavours of unix and on Windows

-- Rahul