The Best Way to Use emby Monitor Files Linux fswatch to Organize Your Media.

Today, I wanted to play around with monitoring my Emby media server. Specifically, I wanted to keep an eye on the files in a certain directory and see when things were added or changed. After doing a bit of searching around, I stumbled upon this tool called fswatch. It seemed like it would do exactly what I needed, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

First things first, I had to get fswatch installed on my Linux machine. Turns out, it’s pretty straightforward. I just used my system’s package manager, and boom, it was installed. No big deal.

Using fswatch

Once I had fswatch installed, I started playing around with it. The basic idea is you run fswatch in one terminal window and then make changes to your files in another window. As you make changes, fswatch spits out notifications about what’s happening.

• I started simple, just monitoring a single directory.
• I ran a command like fswatch /path/to/my/directory, and it started watching.
• Then, I went to another window and added a file to that directory.
• Sure enough, fswatch immediately told me about the new file.
• Neat!

From what I could tell, fswatch is pretty darn efficient. It uses some fancy system-level stuff to get notified of changes, rather than constantly checking the files itself. That means it doesn’t hog a bunch of system resources, which is a big plus in my book.

Advanced usage with ‘poll monitor’

After messing around with the basics, I found out about this “poll monitor” mode. Apparently, this is a good option for Linux systems. It’s supposed to be fast and reliable, even when watching a whole bunch of files or folders.

• I tried running fswatch -r -m poll_monitor /my/big/media/folder.
• The “-r” means it watches subfolders too, and “-m poll_monitor” tells it to use that special mode.
• I dumped a ton of files into that folder, and fswatch kept up without breaking a sweat.
• Color me impressed!

Now, I didn’t see any issues with Emby and its real-time monitoring while I was messing with fswatch. I guess Emby’s smart enough to handle things its own way, and fswatch doesn’t get in the way. It just kind of runs in the background, quietly doing its thing.

Wrapping up

So yeah, that’s my little adventure with fswatch. It’s a pretty cool tool if you need to keep an eye on your files. It’s easy to set up, doesn’t use a ton of resources, and seems to play nice with Emby. I can see myself using this thing more in the future. If you’re looking for a way to monitor files on your own system, I’d say give fswatch a try. You might like it!