onchange is a simple shell script (written in bash) which enables users to listen on changes on the current directory and eventually execute commands as soon as such events are received.
The script works both on Linux and FreeBSD systems (I don't have a Mac to test on it) but has a couple of dependencies:
inotifywaiton Linuxwait_onon FreeBSD
Check whether the right dependency is already installed on your system before launching the script.
Once you have onchange script downloaded and placed somewhere handy, you
can call it directly:
bash /path/of/onchange/onchange.sh ...
or even better, you can create an alias for it:
alias oc="bash ~/workspace/onchange/onchange.sh"
If you are writing a Latex document, and you want to automatically create the dvi/pdf output each time you save the source document, you can just run:
cd /path/of/your/precious/article oc gmake
If you want to launch the testsuite of your project each time you edit a file in order to check if the lastest modifications broke something:
cd /path/of/your/project oc command-to-launch-the-testsuite