What is adhocify?

adhocify uses inotify to watch for file system events. Once an event occurs it can execute a command. The path of the file and the event will be passed to that command.

Options

See adhocify --help.

Examples:

adhocify -w /tmp/ /home/user/myscript.sh

Watches for IN_CLOSE_WRITE events in /tmp/ and launches script /home/user/myscript.sh

adhocify -w /tmp/ -w /var/run /home/user/myscript.sh

Same as above, but also watches /var/run

adhocify /home/user/myscript.sh

Watches for IN_CLOSE_WRITE events in the current directory, launches script /home/user/myscript.

adhocify -m IN_OPEN -w /tmp /home/user/myscript.sh

Watches for IN_OPEN events in /tmp/, launches script /home/user/myscript.sh

adhocify -w /tmp -i *.txt /home/user/myscript.sh

Watches for IN_CLOSE_WRITE events in /tmp/ but will not pass any events for *.txt files to the script

find . -type d | adhocify -s /home/user/myscript.sh

Starts monitoring every subdirectory of the current path for IN_CLOSE_WRITE events. However, inotify has limits, thus it may not always work, e. g. when inotify descriptors are being used by other programs or the tree is too large. Therefore adhocify will exit if it cannot setup a watch for all supplied directories. See inotify(7), /proc/sys/fs/inotify/.

Child exit codes

adhocify -m IN_CREATE --exit-with-child=0 -- /usr/bin/test -f awaited_file

Keep running until the file named "awaited_file" is created in the current directory.

--exit-with-child also supports negation, so e. g. with --exit-with-child='!0' adhocify would keep running as long as the child commands exits with 0.

Passing event data to the command

adhocify -w /tmp/ -w /var/run /home/user/myscript.sh {}

Passes the full path of the file an event occured on to the specified command. It can be retreived from argv[1] in the called command.

adhocify -w /tmp/ /bin/echo the file {} was written to

Running echo "Test" > /tmp/test will print in the shell adhocify was launched in: "the file /tmp/test was written to"

adhocify -m IN_CREATE -m IN_CLOSE_WRITE -w /path -- /bin/env

adhocify passes the inotify event to the command as an environment variable. The variable is called ADHOCIFYEVENT and contains the value of inotify_event->mask as set by inotify.

Other tools

If adhocify does not suit your needs, take a look at:

• inotify-tools: https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki

Install

Debian / Ubuntu

Latest release can be installed using apt

curl -s https://repo.quitesimple.org/repo.quitesimple.org.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://repo.quitesimple.org/debian/ default main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/quitesimple.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install adhocify

Other

To install from source, run

make install

which will place adhocify in /usr/local/bin/