i was working with readdirectorychangesW till i encountered an unwanted behavior.below is short reference the way i am using my readdirectorychanges func. The behavior is that in case a big file in GBs is copied to the watched directory i get the notification immediately and thereby i start doing my operation according to the notification i receive ,but the file IO ( copy operation is still pending) and that results in unxpected state. Can anyone please suggest a way to synchronize this operation. I want the copy operation(that gave me notification) to get completed first then i want to do my processing. while(ReadDirectoryChangesW( hDir, pBuffer, nBufSize, FALSE, FILE_NOTIFY_CHANGE_FILE_NAME, &BytesReturned, NULL, NULL )) { pBufferCurrent = pBuffer; while(pBufferCurrent) { switch(pBufferCurrent->Action) { case FILE_ACTION_ADDED: break; default: break; } if (pBufferCurrent->NextEntryOffset) pBufferCurrent = (FILE_NOTIFY_INFORMATION*)(((oef_u8_t*)pBufferCurrent) + pBufferCurrent->NextEntryOffset); else pBufferCurrent = NULL; }