iowatch

Cross platform way to run arbitrary commands when files change.

Installation

Download one of the prebuilt binaries from the relases page or install it with cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/mauri870/iowatch

Usage

Download a prebuilt binary from the releases page or follow the compilation steps.

iowatch command

Example:

touch /tmp/file.txt
iowatch -f /tmp/file.txt -p echo '> file changed!'

# in another terminal...
echo 'that is a new line' >> /tmp/file.txt

Note: iowatch has builtin support for .[git]ignore files ;)

For commands that uses builtins, pipes or output redirection that needs to run in a shell, there's a -s flag that uses the default system shell:

find /tmp -type f -name '/tmp/*.txt' | iowatch -s 'echo Hello | rev'

It also watch changes recursively if a directory is provided!

echo "dir/to/watch" | iowatch -R echo '!'

A real world use case for example is the linting of a project with hot reload:

echo "./src" | iowatch -R yarn run lint

Or hot reload of a Go project:

echo $PWD | iowatch -R go run .

Or auto compile a Latex project whenever an important file changes:

find . -type f \( -name "*.tex" -o -name "*.bib" -o -name "*.png" \) | iowatch tectonic paper.tex

Compilation

cargo build --release

For arch linux users:

makepkg -sif

Tests

We use bats for testing, you can run them with:

cargo build --release
bats ./tests

Debugging

RUST_LOG=debug iowatch