AZ2Tonez changes: Print 'UPDATED: ' to stdout (or a log file) instead of running arbitrary command. Also, allow the latency to be specified via the command line. Add a fun comment.
This is a small program using the Mac OS X FSEvents API to monitor a directory.
When an event about any change to that directory is received, the specified
shell command is executed by /bin/bash.
If you're on GNU/Linux,
inotifywatch (part of the
inotify-tools package on most distributions) provides similar
functionality.
You need to be on Mac OS X 10.5 or higher with Developer Tools
installed. Then, run make. Copy the resulting fswatch binary to
a directory on your $PATH.
./fswatch /some/dir
This would monitor /some/dir for any change, and print the path names
to stdout every second when a modification event is received.
In the case you want to watch multiple directories, just separate them with colons like:
./fswatch /some/dir:/some/otherdir
In the case you want to wait longer before printing the queued up events (this will print events after waiting for 3 seconds from the first event received):
./fswatch /some/dir:/some/otherdir 3.0
In the case you want to log events to a log file, instead of stdout, specify a log file path:
./fswatch /some/dir:/some/otherdir 1.0 /path/to/log.txt
This code was adapted from the example program in the FSEvents API documentation.