Show HN: Execute a shell command each time a given file or directory changes

Show HN: Execute a shell command each time a given file or directory changes(github.com)

9 points by dinduks 12 years ago | 7 comments

shabble 12 years ago |

I'm sure I've seen a nicely crossplatform command-line tool for this, but I can't seem to find it. The closest (by support for non-poll APIs) seems to be 'simplefilewatcher'[1], but that's just a C++ library.

incron, inotify, filewatcher[2], puncher[3], guard[4] are a bunch of existing ones, but they're all either not entirely functional cross-platform, or require some faffing with dependencies to get working.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/simplefilewatcher/

[2] https://github.com/thomasfl/filewatcher

[3] http://rawsyntax.com/blog/puncher-the-simple-file-watcher-fo...

[4] https://github.com/guard/guard

kseistrup 12 years ago |

I'm aware that it's beyond the scope of cel, but I'd use incron anyday for jobs like this.

stephenr 12 years ago | |

A better approach surely would be to wrap inotify/osx fsevents

lotsofcows 12 years ago | | |

That's what incron does...

dinduks 12 years ago | |

Inotify is specific to Linux, while CEL isn't OS dependent.

osth 12 years ago | | |

Except if you account for the fact that some other UNIX-like OS do not use bash as /bin/sh.

You could even say that using bash as /bin/sh "is specific to Linux."

How to fix: /#!\/bin\/bash/s/bash/sh/