I'm trying to write a program, calcsize, that calculates the size of all sub directories. I want to create a cache of the result and only re-walk the directory if it has changed since the last time I've run the program.
Something like:
./calcsize
//outputs
/absolute/file/path1/ 1000 Bytes
/absolute/file/path2/ 2000 Bytes
I'm already walking the dirs with my own walk implementation because the built in go filepath.Walk is already calling Lstat on every file.
Is there any way to know if a directory or set of files has changed without calling Lstat on every file? Maybe a system call I'm not aware of?
In general, no. However you might want to look at: https://github.com/mattn/go-zglob/blob/master/fastwalk/fastwalk_unix.go
And using that data you can skip some of the stat calls, if you only care about files.
Whether, and how, this is possible depends heavily on your operating system. But you might take a look at github.com/howeyc/fsnotify which claims to offer this (I've never used it--I just now found it via Google).
In general, look at any Go program that provides a 'watch' feature. GoConvey and GopherJS's serve mode come to mind as examples, but there are others (possibly even in the standard library).