I'd like to have a small (not doing too damn much) daemon running on a little server, watching a directory for new files being added to it (and any directories in the main one), and calling another Clojure program to deal with that new file.

Ideally, each file would be added to a queue (a list represented by a ref in Clojure?) and the main process would take care of those files in the queue on a FIFO basis.

My question is: is having a JVM up running this little program all the time too much a resource hog? And do you have any suggestions as to how go about doing this?

Thank you very much!