fsriev

Even if you do not have too many apps installed on your system, there are still numerous files and folders working in the background, each performing its own task. Unfortunately, monitoring their activity and knowing what is written, deleted or modified can be a daunting task.

fsriev is a tiny command line utility designed to ease the burden of watching file and folder modifications.

You can get started by adding the desired directory or file as a new object in the appsettings.json file to the Watchers array. As you probably hinted, here you need to add standard properties such as name, folder path, file filter, notify filters, exclusions, working directory, so on and so forth.

There are three properties that can be configured outside of the Watchers array, namely CommandOutputMode, CommandOutputLevel and LogsDirectory. Once these values are set, the app automatically monitors the configured files or directories and executes the corresponding commands.

On the downside, the app appears to have some shut down issues for the moment. More precisely, it cannot be closed by simply pressing X as that does not kill the process. The developer recommends pressing Ctrl + C several times – although nothing seems to be going on while doing so – to kill all commands before exiting. Alternatively, you can just shut it down directly from Task Manager.

According to the developer, the application relies on ASP.NET Core and hence, you can set up a wide variety of configurations. While this entails that command arguments are not necessary, you can still employ them if that makes things easier for you.

In the eventuality that you need to keep a close eye on a file or folder so that you act promptly to end the task, delete it or perform other action, then perhaps you can consider giving fsriev a try.