My file structure has a symbolic link to a directory /home/me/myDir -> /some/other/dir. This link gets updated by another process and the notifies my process. Upon notification I attempt to get the new canonical path:

public static String getPath()
{
   File file = new File("/home/me/myDir");
   if(file.exists())
   {
      try
      {
         String canonical = file.getCanonicalPath();
         return canonical;
      }
      catch ...
   }

}

The problem is that after the link is changed (an i have verified it changes) it is taking 3-5 times of calling the above getPath() method for to actually get the new path before that the previous path is returned. The only thing I can think of is that java might be optimizing this method and returning the old path. Any ideas or insight is greatly appreciated.

java optimization
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