argos

Argos is a small program that can watch files and run commands when the file emits a specified inotify event.

Building

The shell script make.sh is both the build script and the install script. It needs permission to access /usr/local/bin to install the executable and /usr/local/man/ to add the man page.

$ git clone https://github.com/BlueishSapphire/argos.git
$ cd argos
$ sudo ./make.sh

Running

argos [events... <command>] files...

files... is a list of files to watch.

events... <command> specifies to run command whenever one of the specified events is fired, where event is one of:

Short name	Long name	inotify event(s)
-X	--all	*
-A	--access	ACCESS
-M	--modify	MODIFY
-O	--open	OPEN
-C	--create	CREATE
-S	--close	CLOSE_WRITE, CLOSE_NOWRITE
-D	--delete	DELETE
-B	--attrib	ATTRIB

Examples

Example 1

$ argos -M 'make' ./*.c

This command watches all files in the current directory with the ".c" extension and runs make when one of them gets modified.

This command has two main parts:

1. -M 'make' specifies that when a file is modified (-M), it should run make ('make').

2. ./*.c specifies to watch all ".c" files in the current directory

Example 2

$ argos -M 'pandoc $file -o ${file##md}.pdf' ./*.md

This is a script that I often use while working on markdown files when I want a live preview. It waits for any markdown file to be modified, then uses pandoc (a document conversion utility) to convert the markdown file into a pdf.

This command has two main parts:

1. -M 'pandoc $file -o ${file##md}.pdf' runs pandoc whenever one of the speciied files is modified ($file gets replaced with the name of the file, and ${file##md} is some bash magic for removing the ".md" suffix from the filename)

2. ./*.md specifies to watch all markdown files in the current directory