Documentation ( from Monitor file system activity with inotify ) The inotify C API inotify provides three system calls to build file system monitors of all kinds: inotify_init() creates an instance of the inotify subsystem in the kernel and returns a file descriptor on success and -1 on failure. Like other system calls, if inotify_init() … Read more
I’ve done something similar using the inotifywait tool: #!/bin/bash while true; do inotifywait -e modify,create,delete -r /path/to/your/dir && \ <some command to execute when a file event is recorded> done This will setup recursive directory watches on the entire tree and allow you to execute a command when something changes. If you just want to … Read more
inotify requires support from the kernel to work. When an application tracks a directory, it asks the kernel to inform it when those changes occur. When the change occurs, in addition to writing those changes to disk, the kernel also notifies the watching process. On a remote NFS machine, the change is not visible to … Read more
You may try entr tool to run arbitrary commands when files change. Example for files: $ ls -d * | entr sh -c ‘make && make test’ or: $ ls *.css *.html | entr reload-browser Firefox or print Changed! when file file.txt is saved: $ echo file.txt | entr echo Changed! For directories use -d, … Read more
If you’re using .net, use FileSystemWatcher. More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesystemwatcher.aspx If you’re using C, use FindFirstChangeNotification, FindNextChangeNotification, ReadDirectoryChangesW. More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365261(VS.85).aspx On OSX, the relevant api is the fsevents api. They’re all subtly different from one another, and they all have questionable reliability in edge cases. In general, you can’t depend on these apis … Read more
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 … Read more
import a_module print(a_module.__file__) Will actually give you the path to the .pyc file that was loaded, at least on Mac OS X. So I guess you can do: import os path = os.path.abspath(a_module.__file__) You can also try: path = os.path.dirname(a_module.__file__) To get the module’s directory.