fini is a small and unsophisticated tool inspired by Eric Radman’s entr. Given a directory, it will monitor the size and modification timestamp of files on a polling period. When a file is not longer updated in the polling period, it is assumed to be finished and an arbitrary command is executed.
This was designed primarily for the pseudo-live analysis of data files during lab experiments.
For example, I record nanopore data in .abf format.
Each file is 30 seconds in length but over the course of an experiment I will accumulate hundreds of files.
I might want to monitor some component of the data “live”.
I can achieve this with:
C:\path\fini-amd64.exe -dir=path\to\acquisition\directory\ -match=*.abf -command="python" -options="my-analysis-script.py,/_"
Where my-analysis-script.py would take care of parsing the ABF file and returning some useful information that is logged by fini to the terminal.
fini accepts all parameters as flags.
The base command to trigger on each finished file.
For example -cmd=python or -cmd=wc.
The command must be present in path.
The directory to watch (defaults to “.”).
Globbing pattern for files to watch (defaults “*”). Check the pattern syntax here.
Boolean flag to indicate whether files that are already present in the directory should be processed.
For example, you have already recorded a few data files and you don’t want them to be processed, you can set -ignore (or do nothing since that is default).
If you want them to be processed set -ignore=false.
Comma-separated list of command options.
The special /_ sequence will be replaced with the file name of the finished file.
For example -cmd=wc -options=-l,/_ which amounts to wc -l finished-file.
With Python -cmd=python -options=path/to/script.py,/_.
The period between each successive check of a given file (defaults to 5s).
The cap on the max number of parallel processes (defaults to the number of CPU cores).
If you don’t want to use one of the prebuilt binaries, you can easily compile fini yourself.
It is written in Go; particularly version 1.16.
Using make you can simply run make clean && make to generate binaries to Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux in the bin directory.
- Recursive file globbing
- Logging to file
- Better CLI interface