How to Monitor a Directory
 

Does anyone know of a way to monitor a directory instead of using a cron job?

I have an external source sending me hockey pool statistics via ftp into a certain folder automatically every few days or so and I want to know if there is a way to trigger a PHP script to run when the user has disconnected.

Can anyone help?

Is there any particular reason why you don't want to use cron jobs? As far as I can tell, it seems that any other solution would require a process to be constantly looking at the directory - which would undoubtedly use up more resources. Besides, such a process would probably check the directory, put itself to sleep for a bit, then check again, so it'd even be acting in a similar fashion.