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Enrico Maria Crisostomo edited this page Jun 23, 2022 · 3 revisions

fswatch is a file change monitor that receives notifications when the contents of the specified files or directories are modified. fswatch implements four kinds of monitors:

  • A monitor based on the File System Events API of Apple OS X.
  • A monitor based on kqueue, an event notification interface introduced in FreeBSD 4.1 and supported on most *BSD systems (including OS X).
  • A monitor based on inotify, a Linux kernel subsystem that reports file system changes to applications.
  • A monitor which periodically stats the file system, saves file modification times in memory and manually calculates file system changes, which can work on any operating system where stat (2) can be used.

fswatch should build and work correctly on any system shipping either of the aforementioned APIs.