emcrisostomo/fswatch

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5588 stars · 346 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

fswatch is a cross-platform file change monitor that emits notifications when files or directories are modified, using native OS backends such as macOS FSEvents, Linux inotify/fanotify, BSD kqueue, Solaris FEN, and Windows ReadDirectoryChangesW, with a portable stat-based fallback. It ships as a CLI tool plus libfswatch, a library with C, C++, and Go bindings.

Use cases

• watch source files and rerun tests or rebuild on change
• trigger a command whenever a directory is modified
• monitor log or config files for changes in shell scripts
• cross-platform file watching without OS-specific code
• filter file change events with regex include/exclude patterns
• stream changed file paths into a pipeline with null-delimited output

When to choose

• you need a single portable file-watching command across macOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Windows
• you want native, efficient file system event APIs instead of polling
• you need a C/C++/Go library for embedding file monitoring into your own tools
• you want regex filtering, custom output formats, and batched event counts for build automation

When to avoid

• you only target Linux and prefer a lightweight inotify-only tool
• you need a long-running daemon with alerting or monitoring integrations rather than a CLI stream
• your project requires a permissively licensed dependency, since fswatch is GPL-3.0

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

file-system developer-tools cli workflow-automation developer-tools cross-platform windows bsd cli cross-platform file-change-monitor inotify fsevents kqueue fanotify watch-files libfswatch command-line automation macos linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="emcrisostomo/fswatch")