I'm having trouble monitoring a file for changes. I need to be able to know when a file changes, and when it does, I need the new line that was added. I intend to parse each line and find ones that match certain criteria, and act on information in those lines. I know the expected number of matching lines ahead of time, but I do not know how many lines in total will be added to the file, or where the matching lines will be.
I've tried 2 packages so far, with no avail.
As fas as I can tell, fsnotify
can only tell me when a file is modified, not what the details of the modification was. Since I need to know what exactly was added to the file, this is no good for me.
(As a side-question, can this be run in a loop? The example that I tried exited after just one modification. I need to monitor for multiple modifications.)
This package tries to mimic the Unix tail
command, but it seems to have its own issues. The output that I get includes timestamps and other data - I just want the added line, nothing else. Also, it seems to think a file has been modified multiple times, even when it's just one edit. Further, the deal breaker here is that it does not output the last line if the line was not followed by a newline character.
Delegating to tail
I came across this answer, which suggests to delegate this work to the tail
command itself, but I need this to work cross-platform (specifically, macOS, Linux and Windows). I don't believe that an equivalent command exists on Windows.
How do I go about tackling this?