i may be being thick here sorry but i still dont get it

so THEFOLDER=1 so in your script you just type the variable $THEFOLDER but then shouldnt 1 be the actual folder path ie /mnt/invoicetest because whereand how does it know what 1 is

and THEFILE shouldnt it be * ie wildcard/any so THEFILE=*

Ok, this is the quick version.....

• When you run a bash script anything you put after the script name get passed as "positional parameters".
• These start at 1 through whatever....
• So if you run the script /home/myscript.sh The Quick Brown Fox in your script the variable $1 will have the value The, $2 will be Quick, $3 = Brown, $4 = Fox

When we set up the incrontab line:
we are telling incrond that when the line "fires" for a file to decode the mystical symbols $@ $# $% and then run the script /home/incron/action.sh with them. So if you create a file testfile1 incrond will decode the symbols as follows:
and then will run the script as though you'd typed this in the command line:

Which means that in the script the positional parameters will be:

Personally I hate having to remember what parameter is what in a script and also going back and looking at a line and trying to work out what $3 is way down a file, so it's my personal scripting preference to declare and populate more meaningful variables from the positional ones at or near the start of my scripts.

As I previously explained, I like to make my scripts portable where possible, so by having incron decode $@ we are passing the source folder to the script and we're passing the destination folder too, so we could easily reuse the same script multiple times without having to change anything in it. For example:

And this will work with them using exactly the same action.sh because it was written to be reusable.

In reality, if it was my system, I'd consider adding another parameter to the incrontab entries that would be $5 and used for THELOG so that I could have separate log files for each of the entries. I'd also alter the log file format a bit to have the entries on a single line with a timestamp.

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need to get my head round it sorry but it will click

i have seen this -

Just a few warnings of things that caught me out when I started using incron.

You Can’t Monitor a Directory More than Once
If you try and monitor a directory more than once you will get an error similar to

Sep 23 23:24:02 localhost incrond[9787]: cannot create watch for user root: (16) Device or resource busy

if you want to monitor a dir for different actions use commas to separate the events e.g. ‘IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_DELETE’. Then if needed use the $% wildcard to pass the type of event that triggered the command to your script.

so i was thinking this as rsync can delete aswell

/source IN_CREATE,IN_DELETE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE rsync --delete $@/$#/$% /dest/$#

as $% is the option for multiple events?

thanks,

rob

$% isn't "the option for multiple events" it's decoded in to the text version of the event type that caused the trigger

So if you have your incrontab entry like you've said above when you delete testfile a file incrond will attempt to run:

which doesn't make sense.

Similarly when you create a file you may fire multiple events for the IN_CREATE and IN_CLOSE_WRITE so it'll attempt:
which again, don't make sense.

If you're still determined to use rsync and process the whole folder then you could try: