Detect directory or file changes in *nix
There are various wasys to do this, but this is what I implemented. It is working as expected as of now on my RHEL 5.x boxes. I’ll take my usecase here and describe things.
Plesk web hosting control panel is managing several hundred domains on one of RHEL box. Addition and removal of domains is very common. We need to sync all domain’s httpdocs directory to other webservers. Of course, a simple rsync can be setup for this but it’s much efficient that rsync should only run when there’s any change, ie addition/removal of a domain or file updation etc. What I mean to say, instead of letting rsync detect changes, its better that our script should detect changes and then run rsync. The obvious advantage is that network burden is reduced because rsync will only sync contents with our servers when there are changes.