Triggering a folder action when a file is renamed

Question

I know I can trigger actions when a specific file is added to a folder, but I like to do the same when a file is renamed, e.g. remotely (Dropbox, etc) How can I do that? Thanks

Answer 1

Updated Answer

Here is a little script that will fire Applescript to display a dialog box every time any file changes in your current directory:

#!/bin/bash
fswatch -x . | while read f; do
   osascript <<EOF
tell application "System Events" to display dialog "$f"
EOF
done

So, you would save it as monitor, then make it executable (only necessary once) with:

chmod +x monitor

and run it with:

./monitor

You will see that it fires Applescript each time with the name of any files that change in your directory.

Original Answer

You can maybe use fswatch. I install it with homebrew, using:

brew install fswatch

Then you can run fswatch on your Dropbox account like this:

fswatch -x -r ~/Dropbox

and it will print a line each time anything happens in your Dropbox and you can pass that to a script for processing.

Here are a couple of examples:

and