Home
July 2023

Use watchexec To Run Commands When Files Change

NOTE: I added `-r` to restart the process if it's still running. Need to test to verify that's working as expected.

This top one is my working sample as of May 2024 (but it still seems flaky a little)

#!/bin/bash

watchexec\
  --project-origin "../cli"\
  -w "../cli"\
  --workdir "../cli"\
  -r
  -e rs\
  "bash -c 'cargo test -- --nocapture && cargo run'"

Sometimes you can't go all the way into a directory? which is weird, I had to use this apprahc instead of setting the origin for example-site in the following

#!/bin/bash

watchexec\
  --project-origin "../cli"\
  -w "../cli"\
  --workdir "../cli/example-site"\
  -r
  -e neoj\
  "rsync -av ./ ~/Documents/Neopoligen/v0.1.0-dev/"
cd /Users/alan/Downloads
watchexec -p --filter "ascii-shop.json" --fs-events create mv -- ascii-shop.json "/Users/alan/workshop/asciibear/html/bears.json"

TODO: Add osascript for display to notification center

watchexec -w /some/path --emit-events-to stdin echo
watchexec -w /some/path --emit-events-to json-stdin jq

Notes

  • --debounce is an option. Defaults to 50m
  • --project-origin need to use when you're not in the current dir
  • -w what to watch. . will watch the entire dir. TBD if that's recursive
  • --no-meta which prevents events for firing for metadata changes and only fires them for: 'create', 'remove', 'rename', 'modify',
  • --emit-events-to see docs for now
end of line

References