Executing a bash script upon file creation

Question

I am looking write a small bash script to, when launched, watch a directory for any newly created files. If a new file appears, I want its presence to trigger a second scrip

Answer 1

You can do this with the magical inotify tool :

inotifywait -r -m ./YOUR_MONITORED_DIR |
    while read a b file; do
        [[ $b == *CREATE* ]] && ./another_script "$file"
    done

This method have the big advantage to avoid polling every N seconds.

Inotify (inode notify) is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility, dnotify, which had similar goals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify
See inotify doc