Watch command in a shell script
 

I want to make a script that runs in cron that watches a folder for changes, and IF a change occurs, I'd like to make it email me. Is it possible to get output from the watch command when it's running in the background?

As long as the script itself receives all the output but it would be relatively complex coding (watch runs until killed so you would have to run it in a sub-process and kill it at intervals, all within a timed loop) and inefficient.

Have you considered inotify instead of watch?

I've never heard of inotify. I did an apt-cache search in debian lenny, and never found 'inotify', but I did find inoticoming. Sounds to be exactly waht I need - triggers actions when files hit an incoming directory. Thanks!

You might also want to consider incrond. Here are some links to give you an idea of it.

http://linux.die.net/man/8/incrond
http://linux.die.net/man/5/incron.conf
http://linux.die.net/man/5/incrontab

Sorry -- inotify was introduced with kernel 2.6.13 and I think Lenny's is before that.

Glad the disinformation lead you to a solution, though! :)

Thanks for the suggestions. I like the idea of incrond the best but I find it slightly confusing. I have the daemon running, but how do I define a permanent file it will use? or how often the directory is checked? How would I make it watch for an incoming zip file?

For incoming zip file, I'm assuming I have to edit my incrond file (which I still don't know how to permanently define) to something along the lines of this:

/home/me/zips/ IN_CREATE *.zip

I think that's still wrong, however.