2 Introduction

fswatch is a file change monitor that receives notifications when the contents of the specified files or directories are modified. fswatch interacts with the operating system using a monitor. Currently, the following kinds of monitors are available:

• A monitor based on the File System Events API (FSEvents) of Apple macOS.
• A monitor based on kqueue, an event notification interface introduced in FreeBSD 4.1 and supported on most *BSD systems (including Apple macOS).
• A monitor based on the File Events Notification API of the Solaris kernel and its derivatives, such as Illumos.
• A monitor based on inotify, a Linux kernel subsystem that reports file system changes to applications.
• A monitor based on the Microsoft Windows’ ReadDirectoryChangesW function.
• A monitor which periodically stats the file system, saves file modification times in memory and manually calculates file system changes, which can work on any operating system where the stat() function can be used.

fswatch should build and work correctly on any system shipping either of the aforementioned APIs.

2.1 History and fswatch Authors

Alan DIPERT wrote the first implementation of fswatch in 2009. This version ran exclusively on Apple macOS and relied on the FSEvents API to get change events from the OS.

At the end of 2013 Enrico M. CRISOSTOMO wrote fsw aiming at providing not only a drop-in replacement for fswatch, but also a tool portable across as many operating systems as possible. Besides adding support to other operating systems, fsw introduced new features such as inclusion and exclusion filters and customizable output formats.

In April 2014 Alan and Enrico, in the best interest of users of either fswatch and fsw, agreed on merging the two programs together. At the same time, Enrico was taking over fswatch as a maintainer. As a consequence, development of fswatch has continued on its main repository while the fsw repository has been frozen.

2.2 Reporting Bugs and Suggestions

If you find problems or have suggestions about this program or this manual, please report them as new issues in the official GitHub repository of fswatch at https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch. Please, read the CONTRIBUTING.md file for detailed instructions on how to contribute to fswatch.