Question

I have a basic inotifywait script called watch.sh and a few files ending in .styl in the same directory. Here’s the script, that catches the changes, but doesn’t execute the code within the do/done

I init it like sh watch.sh and here’s the script

#!/bin/sh

while inotifywait -m -o ./log.txt -e modify ./*.styl; do
  stylus -c %f
done

I tried having echo "hi" within the exec portion but nothing executes

Answer 1

The problem you are having is with the -m option for inotifywait. This causes the command to never exit. Since while checks the exit status of a command, the command must exit in order to continue execution of the loop.

Here is the description of -m from the manpage:

Instead of exiting  after  receiving  a  single  event,  execute
indefinitely.   The default behaviour is to exit after the first
event occurs.

Removing the -m option should resolve your issues:

while inotifywait -o ./log.txt -e modify ./*.styl; do
  stylus -c %f
done