Fsniper is a tool to watch for files, and execute commands on them. It can be aquired by anyone running archlinux via these commands
wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fsniper/fsniper/PKGBUILD
sudo makepkg -i
and that’s it. Installed. To start fsniper use the fsniper binary. This will start in the foreground by default, which negligates it’s use. Instead of executing it with a “&” appended, we just use the –daemon option. This executes it as, you guessed it, a daemon. Don’t execute it yet though, as we have no configuration file
Fsniper uses one configuration file, located in ~/.config/fsniper/config. It has a very simple structure, but it is a bit littered with curley brackets, so be carefull. Here’s the layout:
watch {
Directory/you/want/to/watch {
files {
handler = comand you want to execute on file
}
}
}
The files can be defined via name or mime type. The program takes wildcards (* and so on) aswell as enviroment variables. For the handler, “%%” is the full file path, while “%” is just the file name.
As you can see, it’s a simple setup, but hugley usefull. Here is my configuration file:
watch {
$HOME/bin {
* {
handler = chmod 755 %%
}
}
$HOME {
Desktop {
handler = rmdir %%
}
}
}
The first one makes every new file in my bin directory executable, and the second one deleats the Desktop folder everytime it is created (kde desktop keeps making one)
I can’t see much more to say about fsniper apart from one thing, DON’T use it on file types you are likly to download with firefox (*.tar.gz, *.zip, *. jpg ect, ect,) as they are first put into a *.*.part file, while a seperate *.* file is created, meaning that the *.* file is acted upon, but before it has had any data inputed into it from the *.*.part file.
