Hello,

Some applications, and most office applications as you noticed, lock the file they create or change. They do this to prevent other applications to change the file without them knowing it. Other applications (MS Access comes to mind) also do this because the file is not in a consistent state until they close it.

watchDirectory notices that the file is locked and, by default, will wait until the file is unlocked.

In a lot of cases this makes sense: suppose you want to use watchDirectory to copy new/changed files to another location... You wouldn't want to copy 'half-written' files. Also, if you intend to use the COPY command for this copy-action, it will fail (COPY does not copy locked files).

For other cases, the way watchDirectory handles this might not be perfect. If you want to send an email for example. You don't care about the file contents, but just want to notify somebody of the change.

Now for the good news: you can tell watchDirectory to ignore locked files (call your .bat file immediately when the files is created or a change is detected). To enable this behavior you must set the option "Don't wait for files to be available" - corresponding to the command line option /c.

Hope this makes sense,
Gert