Run a shell command when a file is added

Question

I have a folder named images on my linux box. This folder is connected to a website and the admin of the site has the ability to add pictures to this site. However, when a

Answer 1

Like John commented the inotify API is a starting point, however you might be interested in some tools that use this API to perform file notification tasks:

For example incron which can be used to run cron-like tasks when file or directory changes are detected.

Or inotify-tools which is a set of command-line tools that you could use to build your own file notification shell script.

If you look at the bottom of the Wiki pake for inotify-tools you will see references to even more tools and support for higher-level languages like Python, Perl or Ruby (example code).