FSEvents Tools

Description

Command-line tools and scripts that use OS X's FSEvents API. Mostly useful for watching a directory and reacting to changes in it.

This post explains why I made this and includes more usage examples.

Usage examples

Alert if any files in a directory are changed.

notifywait /path/; echo "\007"

Rebuild LESS when anything in styles changes. Assuming you have a script similar to this rebuild_less.sh:

#!/bin/bash
for less_file in styles/*.less
do
  css_file=`echo $less_file | sed -E "s/.less//"`
  lessc $less_file $css_file.css
done

...just run:

notifyloop styles ./rebuild_less.sh

Automatically rsync files to a remote server if any of them are changed.

autorsync . 192.168.1.127:/var/www

The above invokes rsync with -avz (archive mode, verbose, compress). To pass additional arguments to rsync, for example:

RSYNC_OPTS='--exclude="*.pyc"' autorsync . 192.168.1.127:/var/www

To do the same thing "manually":

notifyloop . rsync -avz --exclude="*.pyc" . 192.168.1.127:/var/www

Building from source

Building master

In addition to the standard automake/autoconf/make, you'll need pkg-config. brew install pkg-config should do the trick.

Once you have all the dependencies, run ./autogen.sh and make install.

Building a release tarball

GPG-signed releases are available here.

Building release tarballs requires the same dependencies, except for automake and pkg-config. Once you've installed the dependencies, run:

./configure
make
make install

Depending on permissions, make install may require sudo.

Related software

• inotify-tools. The original tools that inspired me to make fsevents-tools.
• Lsyncd. A service to keep files synced between a master and one or more slave servers.