entr VS fswatch

You could look into entr.

Not sure what generated interest in this.

This was a project I did for my personal use case. But I haven't been using it since years. I'd recommend [entr](https://github.com/clibs/entr) for the use case watchman was to serve.

entr is what I usually reach for when I want to monitor a directory or a list of files and then perform some action on them when changes occur

I've tested it against a 800 page compilation and didn't face any issues : https://github.com/captn3m0/pdp-book

It's obviously not fast enough for live-recompilations with very large projects, but for smaller projects I've run it against entr[0], and it was pretty good.

[0]: https://github.com/clibs/entr

Or even better, fswatch (https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch) which works on Linux, BSDs, macOS, Windows, and even Solaris

If you don’t mind shell shell scripting you can use something like fswatch and some shell logic to do something similar.

Well, I am not too lazy to search but I was interested in your experience, especially with reliability.

This one looks interesting: https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch

What about using https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch ?

The required kernel hooks exist in pretty much any common OS these days, it is a user-space tool that is sometimes missing.

It may not be installed by default, but inotifywait is available in common Linux distributions, usually in a package called something like ionotify-tools, and has been for over a decade-ana-half IIRC. It'll work under WSL on Windows too, though only for ext4 devices not bits of the Windows filesystem made available to Linux.

I can't speak to what other OSs include by default, but as every major OS has a different API for defining how to register a lister and how it gets messages no built-in tool is going to be cross platform. There are third party tools which present more cross-platform consistency, most notably https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch#readme (also available in common Linux distros, just an apt install away in Debian for instance).

fswatch is a cross-platform file change monitor. It will watch any files you specify, then run a script on change.

You can do this without polling using a util like fswatch: https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch

> It watches source files, and regenerates the OpenSCAD files automatically

inotify() is awesome. Here's a library in python that does it.

https://michaelcho.me/article/using-pythons-watchdog-to-moni...

There's also inotifywatch on linux and fswatch on mac. I'm sure there's alternatives for BSD Unix and Windows, but I care the least about those OS's.

https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch

For development it's easy to just ParseFiles before every Execute to be sure you have the latest version. But for production something else is needed, fx watch for changes in files and have this trigger a reload (fx using https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch).