Highlights

• Single header file
• Requires C++17 and std::filesystem
• MIT License
• For now, ONLY works in Linux - based on inotify

Quick Start

Simply include fswatch.hpp and you're good to go.

#include <fswatch.hpp>

To start watching files, create an fswatch object and provide a variadic list of directories to watch.

The constructor takes variadic arguments - Simply provide a list of directories to watch. This watcher will observe your home directory, /opt, /tmp and the current working directory.

auto watcher = fswatch("~", "/opt", "/tmp", ".");

try {
  watcher.start();
} catch (const std::runtime_error& error) {
  std::cout << error.what() << std::endl;
}

Register callbacks to events

To add callbacks to events, use the watcher.on(...) method like so:

watcher.on(fswatch::Event::FILE_CREATED, [](auto &event) {
  std::cout << "File created: " << event.path << std::endl;
});

You can register a single callback for multiple events like this:

watcher.on({ fswatch::Event::FILE_OPENED, fswatch::Event::FILE_CLOSED },
  [](auto &event) {
    if (event.type == fswatch::Event::FILE_OPENED)
      std::cout << "File opened: " << event.path << std::endl;
    else
      std::cout << "File closed: " << event.path << std::endl;
});

Here are the list of events that fswatch can handle:

File Events

Event	Description
FILE_CREATED	File created in watched directory
FILE_OPENED	File opened in watched directory
FILE_MODIFIED	File modified in watched directory (e.g., write, truncate)
FILE_CLOSED	File closed in watched directory
FILE_DELETED	File deleted from watched directory

Directory Events

Event	Description
DIR_CREATED	Directory created in watched directory
DIR_OPENED	Directory opened in watched directory (e.g., when running ls)
DIR_MODIFIED	Directory modified in watched directory
DIR_CLOSED	Directory closed in watched directory
DIR_DELETED	Directory deleted from watched directory

Todo

1. Suppport Win32, FreeBSD, and OSX