You'll probably get more help on stackoverflow... HN isn't really the right venue for specific programming questions :) That being said, you can just use tail

You'll probably get more help on stackoverflow... HN isn't really the right venue for specific programming questions :) That being said, you can just use tail -f as input for your script. Something like this: tail -f input.txt | encoder.sh & and have encoder.sh run in a loop reading stdin into a var, encoding the file if var was non-empty and sleeping if it's empty This is if you are going to be modifying the file while the encoder is running; if the file is static, then sorbus's solution is totally fine. As for mysql, again, input redirection is your friend. mysql -u root -D db < dump.sql will run statements in dump.sql against database called db