Watching files and directories

The ability to receive when a file is added, removed, or updated can extremely useful. Node's fs module supplies this functionality cross-platform; however, as we'll explore, the functionality across operating systems can be patchy.

In this recipe, we'll write a program that watches a file and outputs some data about the file when it changes. In the There's more... section, we'll explore the limitation of Node's watch functionality along with a third-party module that wraps the core functionality to make it more consistent.

Getting ready

Let's create a new folder called watching-files-and-directories, create a package.json in the folder, and then install the third-party human-time module for nicely formatted time outputs:

$ mkdir watching-files-and-directories 
$ cd watching-files-and-directories 
$ npm init -y 
$ npm install --save human-time

We'll also create a file to watch:

$ echo "some content" > my-file.txt

Finally, we want to create a file called watcher...