Is there a command like watch or inotifywait on the Mac

Question

I want to watch a folder on my Mac  Snow Leopard  and then execute a script  giving it the filename of what was just moved into a folder  as a parameter    x sh  filename      I have a script all written up in bash  x sh  that will move some files and other stuff on input  1 I just need OSX to give me the file name when new files folders are moved created into a dir   Any such command

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Here s a one-liner using sschober s tool     while true  do kqwait   file-to-watch js  script-to-execute sh  done

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This is just to mention entr as an alternative on OSX to run arbitrary commands when files change  I find it simple and useful

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watchdog is a cross-platform python API for watching files   directories  and it has builtin  tricks  tool that allows you to trigger actions  including shell commands  when events occur  including new added file  removed file and changed file

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Here s a simple single line alternative for users who don t have the watch command who want to execute a command every 3 seconds    while    do your-command  sleep 3  done   It s an infinite loop that is basically the same as doing the following    watch -n3 your-command

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I have a GIST for this and the usage is pretty simple  watchfiles  lt cmd gt   lt paths    gt    To illustrate  the following command will echo Hello World every time that file1 OR file2 change  and the default interval check is 1 second  watchfiles  echo Hello World   path to file1  path to file2    If I want to check every 5 seconds I can use the -t flag  watchfiles -t  echo Hello World   path to file1  path to file2     -v enables the verbose mode which shows debug information -q makes watchfiles execute quietly    will be shown so the user can see the program is executing  -qq makes watchfiles execute completely quietly -h shows the help and usage   https   gist github com thiagoh 5d8f53bfb64985b94e5bc8b3844dba55

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My fork of fswatch provides the functionality of inotifywait -m with slightly less  no wait  more  I have a lot more troubles on Linux with inotifywait     parse-friendly output    It is an improvement upon the original fswatch because it sends out the actual path of the changed file over STDOUT rather than requiring you to provide a program that it forks    It s been rock solid as the foundation of a series of scary bash scripts I use to automate stuff     this is off-topic  inotifywait on Linux  on the other hand  requires a lot of kludges on top of it and I still haven t figured out a good way to manage it  though I think something based on node js might be the ticket

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You can use launchd for that purpose  Launchd can be configured to automatically launch a program when a file path is modified   For example the following launchd config plist will launch the program  usr bin logger when the desktop folder of my user account is modified    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  UTF-8   gt   lt  DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC  -  Apple Computer  DTD PLIST 1 0  EN   http   www apple com DTDs PropertyList-1 0 dtd  gt   lt plist version  1 0  gt   lt dict gt       lt key gt Label lt  key gt       lt string gt logger lt  string gt       lt key gt ProgramArguments lt  key gt       lt array gt           lt string gt  usr bin logger lt  string gt           lt string gt path modified lt  string gt       lt  array gt       lt key gt WatchPaths lt  key gt       lt array gt           lt string gt  Users sakra Desktop  lt  string gt       lt  array gt   lt  dict gt   lt  plist gt    To activate the config plist save it to the LaunchAgents folder in your Library folder as  logger plist    From the shell you can then use the command launchctl to activate the logger plist by running     launchctl load   Library LaunchAgents logger plist   The desktop folder is now being monitored  Every time it is changed you should see an output in the system log  use Console app    To deactivate the logger plist  run     launchctl unload   Library LaunchAgents logger plist   The configuration file above uses the WatchPaths option  Alternatively you can also use the  QueueDirectories option  See the launchd man page for more information

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fswatch  fswatch 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   Update  fswatch can now be used across many platforms including BSD  Debian  and Windows   Syntax   A Simple Example  The new way that can watch multiple paths - for versions 1 x and higher   fswatch -o   path to watch   xargs -n1 -I     script to run when files change sh      Note  The number output by -o will get added to the end of the xargs command if not for the -I    If you do choose to use that number  place    anywhere in your command    The older way for versions 0 x   fswatch   path to watch   script to run when files change sh   Installation with Homebrew  As of 9 12 13 it was added back in to homebrew - yay  So  update your formula list  brew update  and then all you need to do is   brew install fswatch   Installation without Homebrew  Type these commands in Terminal app  cd  tmp git clone https   github com alandipert fswatch cd fswatch  make cp fswatch  usr local bin fswatch   If you don t have a c compiler on your system you may need to install Xcode or Xcode command line tools - both free  However  if that is the case  you should probably just check out homebrew   Additional Options for fswatch version 1 x  Usage  fswatch  OPTION      path      Options   -0  --print0          Use the ASCII NUL character  0  as line separator   -1  --one-event       Exit fsw after the first set of events is received   -e  --exclude REGEX   Exclude paths matching REGEX   -E  --extended        Use exended regular expressions   -f  --format-time     Print the event time using the specified format   -h  --help            Show this message   -i  --insensitive     Use case insensitive regular expressions   -k  --kqueue          Use the kqueue monitor   -l  --latency DOUBLE  Set the latency   -L  --follow-links    Follow symbolic links   -n  --numeric         Print a numeric event mask   -o  --one-per-batch   Print a single message with the number of change events                         in the current batch   -p  --poll            Use the poll monitor   -r  --recursive       Recurse subdirectories   -t  --timestamp       Print the event timestamp   -u  --utc-time        Print the event time as UTC time   -v  --verbose         Print verbose output   -x  --event-flags     Print the event flags   See the man page for more information

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I ended up doing this for macOS  I m sure this is terrible in many ways      bin sh   watchAndRun if      -ne 2    then     echo  Use like this       echo      0 filename-to-watch command-to-run      exit 1 fi if which fswatch  gt  dev null  then     echo  Watching  1 and will run  2      while true  do fswatch --one-event  1  gt  dev null  amp  amp   2  done else     echo  You might need to run  brew install fswatch  fi

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You might want to take a look at  and maybe expand  my little tool kqwait  Currently it just sits around and waits for a write event on a single file  but the kqueue architecture allows for hierarchical event stacking

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Apple OSX Folder Actions allow you to automate tasks based on actions taken on a folder

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Facebook s watchman  available via Homebrew  also looks nice  It supports also filtering      These two lines establish a watch on a source directory and then set   up a trigger named  buildme  that will run a tool named  minify-css    whenever a CSS file is changed  The tool will be passed a list of the   changed filenames         watchman watch   src        watchman -- trigger   src buildme    css  -- minify-css   Notice that the path must be absolute

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If you want to use NodeJS  you can use a package called chokidar  or chokidar-cli actually  for the watching and then use rsync  included with Mac    Rsync command      rsync -avz --exclude  some-file  --exclude  some-dir         my destination   Chokidar cli  installed globally via npm    chokidar          -c   your-rsync-command-above

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Edit  fsw has been merged into fswatch   In this answer  any reference to fsw should now read fswatch   I wrote an fswatch replacement in C   called fsw which features several improvements    It s a GNU Build System project which builds on any supported platform  OS X v     10 6  with    configure  amp  amp  make  amp  amp  sudo make install  Multiple paths can be passed as different arguments   fsw file-0     file-n   It dumps a detailed record with all the event information such as   Sat Feb 15 00 53 45 2014 -  path to file inodeMetaMod modified isFile   Its output is easy to parse so that fsw output can be piped to another process  Latency can be customised with -l  --latency  Numeric event flags can be written instead of textual ones with -n  --numeric  The time format can be customised using strftime format strings with -t  --time-format  The time can be the local time of the machine  by default  or UTC time with -u  --utc-time    Getting fsw   fsw is hosted on GitHub and can be obtained cloning its repository       git clone https   github com emcrisostomo fsw   Installing fsw   fsw can be installed using the following commands         configure  amp  amp  make  amp  amp  sudo make install   Further information   I also wrote an introductory blog post where you can find a couple of examples about how fsw works

[macos] Is there a command like "watch" or "inotifywait" on the Mac?

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