I am developing a home utility to index and backup my files (ook!) and while searching for an alternative to inotify I found an StackOverflow question aptly named “Is there a command like “watch” or “inotifywait” on the Mac?” that sums it up.
The thing is that it doesn’t stop there. I always dreaded launchd and questioned Apple’s decision to use it instead of a System V init process.
But god, it can replace not only init but also cron and inotify. It really is one program to rule them all!
I’m sold. I only hope that this infatuation doesn’t end with me hacking up a launchd based distro.