The watchdog library is great for this. It comes with an API and a command line tool: https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog https://github.com/gorakhargosh/w

The watchdog library is great for this. It comes with an API and a command line tool: https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog Compatibility: Linux 2.6 (inotify) Mac OS X (FSEvents, kqueue) FreeBSD/BSD (kqueue) Windows (ReadDirectoryChangesW with I/O completion ports; ReadDirectoryChangesW worker threads) OS-independent (polling the disk for directory snapshots and comparing them periodically; slow and not recommended)