Okay, so I wanted to mess around with file watching in Go, and I stumbled upon this neat little package called “cheetah”. Figured I’d give it a shot and see what it could do. My goal was simple: I needed a way to keep an eye on a specific directory and get notified whenever something changed – you know, like a file gets created, deleted, or modified.
Getting Started
First things first, I had to grab the package. I fired up my terminal and used the usual Go command:
go get -u */go-python/gopy
With that done, I was ready to start coding. I created a new Go file (let’s call it ) and started typing away.
The Code Itself
I started by importing the necessary packages. Obviously, I needed cheetah, and I also threw in fmt for some good old-fashioned printing to the console, so I could see what was happening.
package main
import (
"fmt"
"*/go-python/gopy"
Next, I set up the main function. Inside, I created a new watcher instance using .I also check error.
func main() {
watcher, err := *()
if err != nil {
*("Error creating watcher:", err)
return
Now,I tell the watcher which directory to keep an eye on. I used the function * this little experiment, I just used a directory in my home folder called test_folder. You’d obviously change this to whatever directory you actually want to watch.
err = *("/Users/yourname/test_folder") // Don't forget change your directory!
if err != nil {
*("Error adding directory:", err)
return
Handling Events
The real action happens,I use a loop to keep my program running and listening for events. Inside that loop, I used a select statement to wait for either an event or an error from the watcher.
for {
select {
case event := <*:
*("Event:", event)
case err := <*:
*("Error:", err)
If an event came in, I just printed it to the console. In a real application, you’d probably do something more useful here – like processing the changed file or triggering some other action. If an error occurred, I printed that too, just to be safe.
The Full shebang
Here’s the complete code, all put together:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"*/go-python/gopy"
func main() {
watcher, err := *()
if err != nil {
*("Error creating watcher:", err)
return
defer *()
err = *("/Users/yourname/test_folder") // Don't forget change your directory!
if err != nil {
*("Error adding directory:", err)
return
*("Watching directory...")
for {
select {
case event := <*:
*("Event:", event)
case err := <*:
*("Error:", err)
Testing It Out
To run this, I saved the code, navigated to the directory in my terminal, and typed go run *. Then, I went over to my test_folder and started messing around – I created a new file, edited an existing one, deleted something… and sure enough, every time I did something, my little Go program printed out the corresponding event in the terminal! Pretty cool, huh?
So, that’s my little adventure with “cheetah”. It’s a straightforward package that does what it says on the tin. It’s definitely something I’ll keep in mind for future projects where I need to keep track of file changes.