DirectoryMonitor

The DirectoryMonitor is a very simple utility class used to watch for file modifications in a directory tree. In addition to the DirectoryMonitor class, this gem also includes an executable, watch, which is a command line wrapper for invoking the DirectoryMonitor#on_change method and executing a shell- command whenever changes are detected.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'directory_monitor'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install directory_monitor

To use the watch executable, type watch --help for a short description of the command-line options supported. There are few additional hints, here.

TODO: Add hits and examples here.

My personal favorite usage of this utility is as a very simple continuous test monitor. I usually have my project's Rakefile setup with the default task to execute the test suites for my project. Once done, I'll open a command window (sometimes on my desktop and other times just a pane in tumx) and run the following command:

watch --force --delay=0.5 --suffix='\.rb' "clear; rake 2>&1 | more"

This command will cause the rake file to run once, at startup, and from that point on, check every half second for updates to my ruby source files. This is occasionally so helpful I'll actually add this command to my Rakefile as a task named "autotest".

About the best usage example of the class is provided by the watch executable script. See bin/watch for the details.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request