[_mpu]

Not sure how inotify is different from while+stat?

[yid]

Your snark is unwarranted. While+stat in a loop is a poll loop in userspace, inotify is a push mechanism in kernel space.

My point was that the additional functionality of this significantly-sized package beyond running inotify+md5+make in a shell script was unclear.

[Terretta]

Trivial example use of inotify (or rather, inotifywait) to restart Apache after you edit the Apache conf file or add/edit/remove a site config:

    while inotifywait -e attrib,modify /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf -e attrib,modify,create,delete,move -r /etc/httpd/sites-enabled ; do
      /sbin/service httpd graceful && echo "`date -u --rfc-3339=seconds` httpd graceful" >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd-conf.log
    done

Shows how to monitor a single file and a directory, and do a sequence of commands if events happen. Unlike while stat, this doesn't spam checking the file system for changes, it waits until the kernel notifies that a change happened.

To "daemonize" this, tack on an invocation test, perhaps:

    #!/bin/bash
    if [ "x$1" != "x--" ]; then
    $0 -- 1> /etc/httpd/conf/watchconf.log 2> /etc/httpd/conf/watchconf-err.log &
    exit 0
    fi
    
    while inotifywait -e attrib,modify /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf -e attrib,modify,create,delete,move -r /etc/httpd/sites-enabled ; do
      /sbin/service httpd graceful && echo "`date -u --rfc-3339=seconds` httpd graceful" >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd-conf.log
    done