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clibs
entr
C2018–2022
clibs / entr

entr

A utility for running arbitrary commands when files change. Uses kqueue(2) or inotify(7) to avoid polling. entr responds to file system events by executing command line arguments or by writing to a FIFO. entr was written to provide to make rapid feedback and automated testing natural and completely ordinary.

5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
621GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A utility for running arbitrary commands when files change. Uses kqueue(2) or inotify(7) to avoid polling. entr responds to file system events by executing command line arguments or by writing to a FIFO. entr was written to provide to make rapid feedback and automated testing natural and completely ordinary.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-06-01 01:05:31 UTC to 2022-10-07 06:11:16 UTC.

01232018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

5 sources
Find a way with entr[0] and an http server to tell the browser to reload the currently viewed file if it changes. Today, entr allows you to restart a command when a file changes. A web server allows you to serve local files to your browser. If you use npm, lots of libs allow you to serve your web ui, and make the browser reload the page when something has changed. But this is tied to npm, and even to the framework you use (eg: angular has its own way). It would be cool if we could have a way to do that for any tool/language. Like, could a tool tell the browser to reload, because that tool was restarted by entr due to a file change? This would allow live preview on any kind of files, or maybe even program output in the browser without having to press F5 every time. [0]: https://github.com/clibs/entr
In Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
I've tested it against a 800 page compilation and didn't face any issues : https://github.com/captn3m0/pdp-book. Takes ~2 seconds for a fresh build on my system right now. time pystitcher --verbose complete.md output.pdf [2021-12-31 00:00:48] INFO:pystitcher.stitcher:Deleting temporary files real 2.244 user 2.160 sys 0.063 pcpu 99.07 I've run it against entr[0] for live-recompilations, and it was pretty good. [0]: https://github.com/clibs/entr
In Show HN: Pystitcher – A Declarative Alternative to Pdftk

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