Constantly monitoring file for change

[harisund]

I think the title is pretty much obvious. There is a file that I want constantly monitored. Every time it changes I want something to run.

By changes, I mean the content. Basically it is a target file for wget. Everytime I enter a url into it I want wget to start in the background using the contents of the file as the download url.

Is there a way to put it as a script?

Thansks !

[cwaldbieser]

I think the title is pretty much obvious. There is a file that I want constantly monitored. Every time it changes I want something to run.

By changes, I mean the content. Basically it is a target file for wget. Everytime I enter a url into it I want wget to start in the background using the contents of the file as the download url.

Is there a way to put it as a script?

Thansks !
what I would do is wget the page to some file that I could compare it to and then maybe set up a cron job to wget the same page periodically. You could compare them with diff --brief. If diff reports any changes, you can run your script.

[harisund]

hmm...diff was something I hadn't known about.. thanks ..

[Lews Therin]

When I ran Gentoo, I used inotify (http://www.edoceo.com/creo/inotify/) for things like this. Ubuntu doesn't seem to include that patch (no /dev/inotify file), but when the kernel package is updated to 2.6.13 you should be able to use it.