eye

Tiny command line tool for running a command whenever files change.

Installation

npm install -g eye

Getting Started

Basic usage

eye watches files in the current directory that match a glob pattern such as **/*.js and when one of these files change, eye will run the command you passed to it.

After you have install eye, go to a directory with < 50 files (so you don't create ridiculous amounts of listeners) and run:

eye date

eye will watch all files that match the default glob '**/*', '!**/node_modules/**' and when any of those files change, it will run date and log the output:

Wed Apr 10 18:36:36 PDT 2013

Features

eye supports multiple commands and options for those commands such as --short and -v

Running:

eye git status --short and git add . -v

Will watch files that match the default glob and run git status --short and then git add . -v. Notice that I used and instead of &&, this is because Unix uses && and so we have to use and.

Options

All of the options are preceded with --* so they don't conflict with any of the options for the commands you run.

Custom Glob

The --*glob= option lets you use custom globs to specify the files you want to watch. eye uses minimatch for file globbing.

This will watch all .json files in the current directory and any child directories:

eye --*glob=**/*.json ls

Here is an example with two globs, it matches all .json files that are not in the node_modules directory:

eye --*glob=**/*.json,%**/node_modules/** npm test

Note that I am using the % character in place of !, this is because Unix uses it and so we have to use % in the terminal and convert it to !.

Continue

Use the --*continue option to run commands without interuption.

By default, if eye is running a command and a file event occurs, eye will interrupt it and rerun the command. With this option, if a file event is triggered while a command is being run, the running command process won't be interrupted.

Queuing

Use the --*queue option to have commands form a queue and be run one at a time until the queue is empty.

With this option, if eye is running a command and there are additional file change events, commands will be added to the queue. Once the initial command is finished, eye will execute the commands in the queue one by one until it has been emptied.

Verbose

Use the --*verbose option to log useful information. This command:

eye --*verbose --*glob=index.js,*.json ls -a

Will log:

pattern is:
[ 'index.js', '*.json' ]
watched files:
{ '/Users/colinwren/Projects/eye/':
   [ '/Users/colinwren/Projects/eye/index.js',
     '/Users/colinwren/Projects/eye/package.json' ] }

And when a file changes, the command will run and log:

running: ls -a
result:
.
..
.git
.gitignore
LICENSE-MIT
bin
index.js
node_modules
package.json