WATCHTAB(5) BSD File Formats Manual WATCHTAB(5)NAMEwatchtab — tables for driving filewatcherd
DESCRIPTION
A watchtab file contains instructions to the filewatcherd(8) daemon of
the general form: ``run this command when these events happen to the file
at this path''.
Blank lines and leading spaces and tabs are ignored. Lines whose first
non-space character is a pound-sign (#) are comments, and are ignored.
Note that comments are not allowed on the same line as watchtab commands,
since they will be taken to be part of the command. Similarly, comments
are not allowed on the same line as environment variable settings.
An active line of a watchtab will be either an environment setting or a
command. An environment setting is of the form
name = value
where the spaces around the equal-sign (=) are optional, and any subse‐
quent non-leading spaces in value will be part of the value assigned to
name. Note that name cannot contain any blackslash or tabulation.
Several environment variables are set up automatically by the
filewatcherd(8) daemon. LOGNAME and USER are set to the command user,
HOME is set to the home directory of the command user, unless explicitly
overriden. TRIGGER is set to the path that has triggered the command
execution.
The format of a watchtab command is a tabulation-separated sequence of
fields, interpreted as follow:
path Path of the file to watch
events Set of events which trigger the command. It can either be a sin‐
gle star-sign (*), or a punctuation-separated list of names
among: DELETE, WRITE, EXTEND, ATTRIB, LINK, RENAME and REVOKE.
Their meaning is defined in kqueue(2) for fflags for
EVFILT_VNODE.
delay Number of seconds, allowing a decimal point, between the trigger
and when the command is actually run.
user User, and optionally group preceded by a colon sign (:), to
change to before running the command.
chroot Path of a directory in which to chroot before running the com‐
mand.
command The command to run.
When less than 6 fields are given in a command line, the chroot value is
considered omitted, and chroot will be performed. When less than 5
fields are given, the user value is considered omitted, and no setuid or
setgid will be performed. When less than 4 fields are given, the delay
value is considered as zero. It is an error to provide less than 3
fields.
SEE ALSOcrontab(5)filewatcherd(8)kqueue(2)BSD October 19, 2015 BSD
