fswatch

A trivial Ruby script for triggering a command on file system change in OS X.

The point was mainly to shove this into gemcutter so it's easy to deploy:

$ gem install fswatch

On file system change execute ls -l:

$ fswatch ls -l

Watch a specific path:

$ fswatch -d / ls -l

Wait at least 5 seconds before refreshing using deferral:

$ fswatch -t5 ls -l

If the command is long running and you want to forcibly restart it on file system change:

$ fswatch -x ls -l

If you want to pass the paths which have changed as a parameter to the command:

$ fswatch -p echo

If you want to place the paths somewhere other than at the end, use the @fspaths token:

$ fswatch -p "echo @fspaths | wc -l"

You can also use @fspathscolon for colon-separated paths and @fspatchcomma for comma-separated paths.

Automatically rsync on changes:

$ fswatch -t 5 "rsync -av . devbox:/devfolder-on-devbox/"