Fun fact, chokidar is a Sanskrit word meaning watchman.<p>It has an interesting root, it comes from the Proto Indo-European word for "four", because he must watch any enclosure of four walls. This ancient word is the source of the Latin "quartus" which comes into English as "quarter"<p>The PIE sense is echoed a little in phrases like "living quarters", "give no quarters" etc
It's a shame that fanotify[0] wasn't pointed out in this document also.<p>Only since seeing it used in 'zigs --watch' impl on Linux[1] (and the fact that I need to enable admin capabilities to run this in a container) has informed me of it's existence.<p>0. <a href="https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/filesystem-monitoring.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/filesystem-monitoring.ht...</a><p>1. <a href="https://ziggit.dev/t/initial-implementation-of-zig-build-watch-just-landed-in-master-branch/5117/8" rel="nofollow">https://ziggit.dev/t/initial-implementation-of-zig-build-wat...</a>
This is very timely!<p>Linux still doesn't have a networked file watching protocol, does it? Like SGI fam, which gamin is based on. I understand SMB/CIFS supports this in the protocol, but Linux clients don't, and I don't remember if Samba does as a server.<p>inotify is still an ugly and error-prone interface but it does basically work.<p>What does the situation look like on other free OSes?<p>A common related requirement is to access a given version of a file, for example so that you know it's consistent with itself. Linux does support so-called "reflinks" for this... but ext4 doesn't. Sad trombone.
A very useful list, thanks! I hope you'll keep updating it.<p>I guessed the date(s) indicated the tool's approximate period of active development, but apparently not ? Eg watchexec says "2016-2019" but had a major release a few days ago.<p>[Ah. Because this post is from 2019, and wasn't flagged as such on HN, and the list needs updating.]