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I've had a mac at work lately, and was amazed to see that Xcode would still find my latest project after I renamed its folder and moved it someplace else.

Now I understand that this is the result of a heavy infrastructure at work, but I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow come up with similar functionality for the rest of the Unix world ?

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Mac OS X is in the Unix world. – mouviciel Oct 14 '10 at 14:15
Indeed, edited. – julien Oct 14 '10 at 14:54
Does it track changes no matter where you made the change? For example if you used mv /path/to/project /new/path/to/project would it still find it? Or are you moving/renaming in Xcode? Most IDEs will be able to trivially change/rename/move project files and still find them just fine. – Falmarri Oct 14 '10 at 18:13
How did you move the project? Where did you move it to? I can certainly imagine that if you use Xcode to move it, it's a no-brainer. If Xcode uses some convention ("all projects are under ~/Projects") and you moved it around there, it could just look there (or even search all over your $HOME for stuff that looks like projects, today's machines have enough performance that you wouldn't necessarily notice). – vonbrand Jan 31 at 16:50

1 Answer

up vote 10 down vote accepted

Well on Linux you could use inotify to track changes to your files. Inotify is in-kernel and has bindings to many different languages allowing you to quickly script such functionality if the app you are working with does not support inotify yet.

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Sounds like it could be used to store ancient pathes to a file, and with a file-not-found-hook lookup the current path. Nice – julien Oct 14 '10 at 16:26

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