About

holdon is an inotify(7)-based console utility for monitoring file content modifications.

A utility watches a bunch of files, awaits for changes, catches the first modification, displays the name of the modified file, and exits. This utility might come in handy in shell scripts.

Usage Examples

Lets automate updating of a name.html file at every change of its name.md source. The following shell script may be used to automatically rerun markdown during editing session of the source file:

---

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
    markdown README.md > README.htm
    holdon README.md
done

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Its also easy to automatically rebuild a project when one of its files gets changed (kinda "a poor man's IDE-less programming efforts") -- make utility handles build process, whereas holdon utility postpones the next run of make until changes happen.

---

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
    make
    holdon *.c *.h
done

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