Allow filtering by event type about fswatch HOT 8 CLOSED

Hey @emcrisostomo, could you elaborate on how to use the event filters?

I tried

fswatch --event=CLOSE_WRITE files

which I expected to fire only on CLOSE_WRITE events.
Is that the intended behaviour? Unfortunately I could not find any information in the manuals except for:

--event name
      Filter event with the specified name.  This option can be used multiple times, one for each event name that must be included in the output.

Unfortunately, on my linux machine this just immediately exits.

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Like the others have said, I think this feature would be extremely useful.
Most of the time we are only interested in actual file changes (CREATE, CLOSE_WRITE, DELETE, MODIFY, MOVED_FROM, MOVED_TO) and we would like to ignore read events (OPEN, ISDIR, CLOSE_NOWRITE, etc.).

I realize that it may not be trivial to implement this in a platform-independent manner, because the events probably differ from one platform to another.
A compromise solution could be to just add a way to filter read events from write events.

Thank you for all the hard work!

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I would definitely like this as well. For example, I only want newly created files to appear in the output.

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Hi @grosch, I expect this issue to be closed quite soon. I'll post updates here.

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I'd like to second this, I'm writing a script to move newly-created files that are dropped remotely into a folder, but on Linux each file creation results in 4 events (only one of which is creation) - and it can also results in an event on the parent folder. So it's much harder to isolate just the created file

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Hi @lucianp,

you're welcome and thanks, it's appreciated.

Yes, I agree it would be useful. In fact, I'm reviewing the mappings between platform-specific events and "generic" fswatch events soon and implement this.

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Hi all,

This issue has been fixed in 1.5.0. I'll prepare the OS X ports shortly.

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@fanktom hello from the future.

Leaving this here incase anyone else is having issues using the event filters. I wasn't able to find the event names anywhere on github or the man page.

After looking at the source I found the event names here in the event.cpp

I was able to use the event filters like so:

fswatch --event "Updated" .  

For an even more specific example I used the filters combined with the -i flag to only watch for .scss files being Updated like so:

fswatch --event "Updated" -e ".*" -i "\\.scss$" .

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