Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 19.11.2020 08:57, David W. Hodgins wrote:

On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 02:26:56 -0500, Janis Papanagnou
<janis_papanagnou@hotmail.com> wrote:

Search about inotify

Thanks. But this looks like a C-programming interface. Rather than a
programming interface I'd be looking either for an existing command line >>> tool or programming options that I can use for shell scripting the task.

See the output of the commands "inotifywait -h" and "inotifywatch -h"
from the inotify-tools package.

It seems that is it. Thanks!

(Late answer, I know...) It sounds like you only need a Linux solution, but
if you want something more portable later, you might consider fswatch [1].
It's a command-line tool that provides a common interface to OS-specfic ways
of watching files: inotify on Linux, the File System Events API on macOS, kqueue on some BSDs, and so on.

[1] https://emcrisostomo.github.io/fswatch/

Benjamin

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On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 11:35:41 AM UTC+8, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

I want to inspect file status information and directory contents
by some watchdog tool; e.g. new files appearing in a directory or
a file update should be detected and indicated by an alert window.
This should work only on dedicated files or directories, say, by
calling the tool with the respective name and/or file attributes.
Before I'm going to write my own command line tool I'd be interested
if there's something like that already existing.

There is a very helpful discussion here:

https://superuser.com/questions/181517/how-to-execute-a-command-whenever-a-file-changes

HY

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On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 4:05:49 PM UTC+8, hongy...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 11:35:41 AM UTC+8, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

I want to inspect file status information and directory contents
by some watchdog tool; e.g. new files appearing in a directory or
a file update should be detected and indicated by an alert window.
This should work only on dedicated files or directories, say, by
calling the tool with the respective name and/or file attributes.
Before I'm going to write my own command line tool I'd be interested
if there's something like that already existing.

There is a very helpful discussion here:

https://superuser.com/questions/181517/how-to-execute-a-command-whenever-a-file-changes

Based on the suggestions given in the above discussion, I currently use the following code snippet:

inotifywait --quiet --monitor --event modify some-file-under-watch | while read change; do
do-something-here
done

HY

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On 05.08.2021 11:56, hongy...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 4:05:49 PM UTC+8, hongy...@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 11:35:41 AM UTC+8, Janis Papanagnou wrote: >>> I want to inspect file status information and directory contents

by some watchdog tool; e.g. new files appearing in a directory or
a file update should be detected and indicated by an alert window.
This should work only on dedicated files or directories, say, by
calling the tool with the respective name and/or file attributes.
Before I'm going to write my own command line tool I'd be interested
if there's something like that already existing.

There is a very helpful discussion here:

https://superuser.com/questions/181517/how-to-execute-a-command-whenever-a-file-changes

Based on the suggestions given in the above discussion, I currently use the following code snippet:

In my case (the task behind the original post) it is something like

inotifywait -q -m -e create -e delete "${dir}" |
while read WHERE EVENT FILE
...check for file pattern and trigger a 'zenity' dialog...

i.e. triggering 'create' and 'delete' events on files matching a
specific pattern, and notifying about those events using 'zenity'.

('zenity' isn't optimal here, but each tool has it's drawbacks.)

Janis

inotifywait --quiet --monitor --event modify some-file-under-watch | while read change; do
do-something-here
done

HY

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