Steel Overseer

The world is already run by all manner of machines. One day, they'll remind us of that fact.

-Sargis Haz, artificer

It is

A development tool that runs commands when certain files are updated, added or deleted.

Steeloverseer watches files whose names match a regular expression and then runs a series of commands when those files are updated.

Specifically

A filesystem event occurs when a file is added, deleted or updated. If this event happens on a file that matches one of the patterns provided with the -p PATTERN flag then steeloverseer will run the commands provided with the -c COMMAND flag. These commands will be performed in serial until one hangs, fails or all exit successfully.

You can provide multiple patterns and multiple commands, ie:

sos -c "git status" -c "echo hi world" -p "hs" -p "md"

You can seperately specify the directory to run in with -d DIRECTORY. The default is ..

This will execute git status followed by echo hi world whenever files matching "hs" or "md" are changed. -d DIRECTORY is not provided above, so it's assumed to be ./.

Also, since -p PATTERN are regular expressions we can do the same as above with:

sos -c "git status" -c "echo hi world" -p "hs|md"

Of course this would run whenever any match on "hs|md" is found, for instance on the filepath /Users/home/mdman/file.txt. For extensions it may make sense to use the endline matcher:

sos -c "git status" -c "echo hi world" -p "hs$|md$"

Installation

Using cabal, cabal install steeloverseer.

Usage

sos: Usage: sos [v] -c command -p pattern
  -v            --version              show version info
  -c COMMAND    --command=COMMAND      add command to run on file event
  -p PATTERN    --pattern=PATTERN      add pattern to match on file path
  -d DIRECTORY  --directory=DIRECTORY  set directory to watch for changes (default is ./)

Future

Project .sosrc file for specifying multiple sos commands while working on a project (@see issue #4)

Art above by Chris Rahn for Wizards of the Coast