Problem: monitor file changes from a shell script and execute some commands when necessary. For example, rebuild LaTeX document or compile program every time when one of its source files is changed.
Solution: inotify-tools help to monitor file changes. There are two utilities. The first one, inotifywait, blocks and waits for changes, then returns. If the event it was waiting for happened, its return code is 0 (success). See an example of using inotifywait below. The second utility is inotifywatch, it monitors files' changes, collects information and prints a nice table on exit. Please visit inotify-tools' site to see examples of its use.
Example: inotifywait monitors all *.tex and *.bib files in the current directory, and when any of them changes, it runs pdfLaTeX and BibTeX to rebuild document:
while true ; do \
inotifywait *.tex *.bib \
&& ( pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode mypaper && \
bibtex mypaper && \
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode mypaper ) \
done
P.S. Please note that when we run LaTeX with -interaction=nonstopmode, it does not ask questions on errors but we can still see those errors.
P.P.S. inotify-tools run only on Linux. You may need to use pnotify or kqueue on *BSD.
