Inotify is a mechanism in the Linux kernel that reports when a file system event occurs.
The inotifywait comand line utility can be used in shell scripts to monitor directories for new files. It can also be used to monitor files for changes. Inotifywait must be installed and is often not part of the base installation of your Linux distro. However, if you need to monitor a directory or some task like that, it is worth the effort. (apt-get install inotify-tools).
Here is how you use it:
inotifywait -m -r -e close_write /tmp/ | while read LINE; do echo $LINE | awk '{ print $1 $3 }'; done
Let's dissect this example one part at a time. The most interesting part is this:
inotifywait -m -r -e close_write /tmp/
What happens here? First, inotifywait monitors the /tmp directory. The monitoring mode is specified with the -m option, otherwise inotifywait would exit after the first event. The -r option specifies recursion, beware of large directory trees. The -e option is the most important part. You only want to be notified of new files if they are complete. So only after a close_write event should your script be notified of an event. A 'create' event for example, should not cause your script to perform any action, because the file would not be ready yet.
The remaining part of the example is just to get output like this:
/tmp/test1234/blablaf
/tmp/test123
/tmp/random.bin
This output can be used to use as an argument to other scripts or functions, in order to perform some kind of action on this file.
This mechanism is specific to Linux. So it is not a OS independent solution.
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