koldfront

watchfile #shell

Recently I was editing a Markdown file and I was converting it to HTML with pandoc for every edit.

Re-running the command quickly became tedious - I could use some kind of framework for editing Markdown or something elaborate, but what I really wanted was just "run a command when a file changes".

So, watchfile was born - it basically just wraps inotifywait from the inotify-tools package:

#!/bin/sh

# watchfile FILE COMMAND - run a command whenever a file changes.

FILE=$1
shift

while inotifywait --quiet --quiet "$FILE"; do
    echo -n "Running '$*' ... "
    "$@"
    echo "done."
done