Watch a specific directory.

[jaypeedevlin]

I'm wanting to monitor for a file change two directories deep, where the filename is known but the middle directory is not. This is what I have so far:

while true;
    do ls foo/*/bar.txt | entr -dp echo /_;
done

If when I start the while loop the file foo/1/bar.txt exists, it seems like the directory foo/1 is detected to be watched, not foo (which makes total sense, it's just not what I'm trying to do).

I can see in the documentation there is a reference to -d being able to used with an explicitly supplied directory, but try as I might I can't get the syntax to work. I'm not sure if what I'm trying to achieve is not currently supported, or if it is and I'm just missing something from a syntax perspective.

Could you offer some clarification?

[eradman]

Let me see if I can answer this using a slightly different example:

mkdir -p src/{1,2,3}
touch src/1/a.txt
touch src/2/b.txt

Now we have three directories and two files

src
├── 1
│   └── a.txt
├── 2
│   └── b.txt
└── 3

The trick here is to find the files and an empty directories. You can do this using a combination of ls -d and shell globbing. Try

ls -d src/* src/*/* | sort

Now if you add/remove/modify files the following loop should track properly

while sleep 1; do
    ls -d src/* src/*/* | entr -dp echo /_
done

[jaypeedevlin]

Thanks Eric, I'll take this and see if I can mold it to my specific needs!