The situation is as follows:
A series of remote workstations collect field data and ftp the collected field data to a server through ftp. The data is sent as a CSV file which is stored in a unique directory for each workstation in the FTP server.
Each workstation sends a new update every 10 minutes, causing the previous data to be overwritten. We would like to somehow concatenate or store this data automatically. The workstation’s processing is limited and cannot be extended as it’s an embedded system.
One suggestion offered was to run a cronjob in the FTP server, however there is a Terms of service restriction to only allow cronjobs in 30 minute intervals as it’s shared-hosting. Given the number of workstations uploading and the 10 minute interval between uploads it looks like the cronjob’s 30 minute limit between calls might be a problem.
Is there any other approach that might be suggested? The available server-side scripting languages are perl, php and python.
Upgrading to a dedicated server might be necessary, but I’d still like to get input on how to solve this problem in the most elegant manner.
Most modern Linux’s will support inotify to let your process know when the contents of a diretory has changed, so you don’t even need to poll.
Edit: With regard to the comment below from Mark Baker :
‘Be careful though, as you’ll be notified as soon as the file is created, not when it’s closed. So you’ll need some way to make sure you don’t pick up partial files.’
That will happen with the inotify watch you set on the directory level – the way to make sure you then don’t pick up the partial file is to set a further inotify watch on the new file and look for the IN_CLOSE event so that you know the file has been written to completely.
Once your process has seen this, you can delete the inotify watch on this new file, and process it at your leisure.