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"watch changes"

Watch for changes to files within the current directory and run a command when they occur.

Wach is really fast, the command is run as soon as the file changes, no polling delay.

Comes with two executables: wach and wachs.

The wach utility will run any command (or inline shell script) whenever files in the current directory are updated.

The wachs (there's an "s" on the end) utility does the same thing but for commands that launch a long running process like a web server. It'll kill the current process and launch a new one.

Requirements

Only runs on OS X >=10.7 (Lion and up)

Install

npm install wach

Examples

Run make every time a file in the current directory is updated/added

wach make

Compile and run on every change

wach "gcc hello.c && ./a.out"

Only watch for changes to coffee files, compile the one that changed

wach -o *.coffee, coffee -c {}

Run the tests every time a ruby file changes

TEST_DIR=generators wach -o **/*.rb, bundle exec rake test

Restart a node app any time a js file changes

wachs -o *.js, node server.js

Node API

wach = require('wach'); wach('.', function(path) { return console.log("something happened to " + path + "!"); })

Contributing

Patches welcome. Especially if you'd like to re-write this in plain JavaScript. Just fork and make a pull request

Other similar projects:

Patrick Mueller's wr https://github.com/pmuellr/wr

steakout http://michael-mccracken.net/software/stakeout.tgz

steakout.rb http://www.pragmaticautomation.com/cgi-bin/pragauto.cgi/Monitor/StakingOutFileChanges.rdoc

the --watch flag for coffeescript http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#usage

unix watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_(Unix)

TJ Holowaychuk's watch https://github.com/visionmedia/watch

Isaac Z. Schlueter's node-supervisor https://github.com/isaacs/node-supervisor

David Trejo's run.js https://github.com/DTrejo/run.js

Gabriel Gironda's kqfm https://github.com/gabrielg/kqfm

Mark Bao's watchdir https://github.com/markbao/watchdir