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So I know you can exclude files from being watched but what about the other way ? What if I only want to watch *.txt only ?

blank_sam
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1 Answers1

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Just pass the names you want to watch as arguments:

intotifywait ... *.txt

If you are concerned the pattern will match too many files to fit on the command line, you can use the --fromfile arguments to read the list of files to monitor from a file. The file needs to contain the actual file names, not a pattern, so you might need to create the file with something like

for f in *.txt; do printf '%s\n' "$f"; done > files.txt
inotifywait --fromfile files.txt ...
chepner
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  • the command seems to work only if a txt file exists but the directory might be empty in my case and I want it to keep runnin in a while loop – blank_sam Sep 29 '16 at 18:26
  • In that case, you aren't really watching the files, but rather the directory itself. – chepner Sep 29 '16 at 18:28