How can I “watch” a file for modification / change? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Use FAM to put a monitor on the file.

Answer 2

Apparently, watchdog works on both Linux & OSX that can be used to monitor for changes in a directory as well with great example documentation. It also works with python3.x in case you don't want to be forced to use python2.x

Answer 3

Install inotify-tools and write a simple shell script to watch a file.

Answer 4

The other option is to use a checksum. You can use a pattern similar to nose's nosy.py. I use the one from dingus to check my directory for modifications and run the test suite.

Answer 5

use a quick hash function, a cron job, and off you go!

Also, this looks relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify

Answer 6

The Linux Kernel has a file monitoring API called inotify. A python binding is pyinotify.

With it, you can build what you want.