2 Introduction

fswatch is a file change monitor that receives notifications when the contents of the specified files or directories are modified. fswatch implements four kinds of monitors:

• A monitor based on the File System Events API of Apple OS X.
• A monitor based on kqueue, an event notification interface introduced in FreeBSD 4.1 and supported on most *BSD systems (including OS X).
• 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 and reads change events asynchronously.
• 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 stat (2) 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 OS X 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 common front-end from multiple file system change events APIs, including:

• OS X FSEvents.
• *BSD kqueue.
• Linux inotify.
• Microsoft Windows.

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 will continue on its main repository while the fsw repository will likely be frozen and its documentation updated to redirect users to fswatch.

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. If you wish, you may contact the authors at the addresses listed in the AUTHORS file.

When reporting a bug, please be sure to include as much detail as possible.