Direcory Listening with OS support

Am trying to load all the properties file of my JEE application to the application cache in startup. so that i can reduce the time of file loading every time when i access the property file. At the same time i wanted to provide dynamic property support(some values in the property files can be changed without server shutdown), in these cases i need to reload my content in the cache.

So for enabling this, i need to listen to a directory/file system and reload my content whenever there is an create/delete/modify happens to any file in that file system. I did this using polling(setting up a timer and scheduling to check the directory). Please help me to do this without polling or timer in any sort.. i want to get notified by the Operating system(Let that be either windows/linux/unix/etc..)