Example of how to poll ReadDirectoryChangesW on Windows

ReadDirectoryChangesW_craziness.cpp

int main() {
  char *path = "/path/to/my/directory";
  print("watching %s for changes...\n", path);

  HANDLE file = CreateFile(path,
    FILE_LIST_DIRECTORY,
    FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE | FILE_SHARE_DELETE,
    NULL,
    OPEN_EXISTING,
    FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS | FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED,
    NULL);
  assert(file != INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE);
  OVERLAPPED overlapped;
  overlapped.hEvent = CreateEvent(NULL, FALSE, 0, NULL);

  uint8_t change_buf[1024];
  BOOL success = ReadDirectoryChangesW(
    file, change_buf, 1024, TRUE,
    FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_FILE_NAME  |
    FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_DIR_NAME   |
    FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_LAST_WRITE,
    NULL, &overlapped, NULL);

  while (true) {
    DWORD result = WaitForSingleObject(overlapped.hEvent, 0);

    if (result == WAIT_OBJECT_0) {
      DWORD bytes_transferred;
      GetOverlappedResult(file, &overlapped, &bytes_transferred, FALSE);

      FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION *event = (FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION*)change_buf;

      for (;;) {
        DWORD name_len = event->FileNameLength / sizeof(wchar_t);

        switch (event->Action) {
          case FILE_ACTION_ADDED: {
            wprintf(L"       Added: %.*s\n", name_len, event->FileName);
          } break;

          case FILE_ACTION_REMOVED: {
            wprintf(L"     Removed: %.*s\n", name_len, event->FileName);
          } break;

          case FILE_ACTION_MODIFIED: {
              wprintf(L"    Modified: %.*s\n", name_len, event->FileName);
          } break;

          case FILE_ACTION_RENAMED_OLD_NAME: {
            wprintf(L"Renamed from: %.*s\n", name_len, event->FileName);
          } break;

          case FILE_ACTION_RENAMED_NEW_NAME: {
            wprintf(L"          to: %.*s\n", name_len, event->FileName);
          } break;

          default: {
            printf("Unknown action!\n");
          } break;
        }

        // Are there more events to handle?
        if (event->NextEntryOffset) {
          *((uint8_t**)&event) += event->NextEntryOffset;
        } else {
          break;
        }
      }
      
      // Queue the next event
      BOOL success = ReadDirectoryChangesW(
            file, change_buf, 1024, TRUE,
            FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_FILE_NAME  |
            FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_DIR_NAME   |
            FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_LAST_WRITE,
            NULL, &overlapped, NULL);

    }

    // Do other loop stuff here...
  }
}

thanks

Something additional to note: the change_buf needs to be DWORD aligned, as stated in the docs: "A pointer to the DWORD-aligned formatted buffer in which the read results are to be returned". Power-of-2 alignments greater than alignof(DWORD) should also work. For example, malloc always returns memory locations that are 16-byte aligned (or a similarly large alignment).

We can use the C++11 alignas specifier for aligning a local buffer: alignas(DWORD) uint8_t change_buf[1024];

Edit: there's an additional alignment problem that should be noted. It seems that Windows will sometimes give you values for NextEntryOffset that if you directly cast FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION from the u8 buffer at that point, it will be a misaligned-memory read. This probably will still be valid on your CPU - but with a speed penalty, or it might be a crash. If you have Clang/GCC Undefined Behavior Sanitizer enabled you may get a crash here. The workaround for this problem is to memcpy the data out of the buffer into another FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION which you know will be aligned correctly. Be careful with the FileName member while doing this - you probably need to do a separate memcpy for that; offsetof(FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION, FileName) may be helpful here to determine the memory location to copy from.