NAME

watchtab — 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 subsequent 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 single 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 command.

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 ALSO

kqueue(2), crontab(5), filewatcherd(8)