Todd Boss

Using a few free tools, you can create your own Dropbox-esque system on your own network.  Due to its sheer simplicity and cross-platform awesomeness, I think I’ll stick with Dropbox for the time being.  However, this article turned me on to inotify, which you can use to automatically monitor a file tree in Linux.

Inotify will watch the specified folders for changes and notify you when they happen.  I’m actually pretty excited about this since I’ve got a need to do just that in my master’s project, and I was dreading the idea of writing a polling algorithm to repeatedly walk the whole tree (to say nothing of the performance implications).

If you’d like to try inotify (it’s included in Linux kernels since mid-2005) check out the fileschanged command here.  With one quick command, you can set it up to watch a folder and report changes any way you want.

Next, I’ll be checking out inotify-java and JNotify for potential use in my Groovy/Java project.