On: Entr(1) – Run tests whenever files change

[oever]

inofity is no fantastic. Memory use scales with the number of directories watched. The program that uses the inotify system call has to keep a mapping of file descriptors to paths. Inotify is slow, inefficient and error-prone for recursively watching file systems.

fanotify is not an alternative because it cannot monitor file deletion or renames and it requires root permission.

http://www.lanedo.com/filesystem-monitoring-linux-kernel/

[problems → oever]

> The program that uses the inotify system call has to keep a mapping of file descriptors to paths

If it doesn't care what file is modified and just wants to run a command on any change, why would it need to do this?

[oever → problems]

In that case it's not needed. One could imagine that one would like to start a specific command. That is what 'tup monitor' does.

Another use-case is a desktop search tool.

http://gittup.org/tup/manual.html