nibalizer / trendiest

Daemon to refresh 'latest' symlink to most recent file in a directory

Trendiest

Trendiest is a simple daemon that watches directories and manages a symlink named 'latest' which always points to the most recently modified file in the directory. This is useful for pointing at your Downloads or screenshots folder.

Examples:

# Download powerpoint presentation

libreoffice ~/Downloads/latest

# Take screenshot

feh ~/Pictures/latest

# insert usb stick
# Download ubuntu iso 
sudo dd if=~/Downloads/latest of=/dev/sdb # Probably don't actually do this

Details

Trendiest uses inotify to get file events. It fires once the file has been closed for writing. It uses a new symlink and a move operation to atomically replace the target symlink. There shouldn't be any race conditions but YMMV.

Installation

Unfortunately, the state of inotify python libraries is not great. There is an old unmaintained version packaged for debian, and a new unpackaged version on pypi. My solution to this is to create a virtualenv for the daemon and run it out of there with systemd.

cd local
git clone https://github.com/nibalizer/trendiest
cd trendiest/
virtualenv --python=python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt 
cp example_config.yaml config.yaml
vim config.yaml # make whatever modifications
vim contrib/trendiest.service # make whatever modifications to make yours work
sudo cp contrib/trendiest.service /etc/systemd/system/
systemctl daemon-reload 
sudo systemctl start trendiest.service
sudo systemctl status trendiest.service

# optional 
sudo systemctl enable trendiest.service

Name

This daemon keeps the latest file easy to get at with a symlink, so you could say it's very trendy. Or maybe the trendiest. Yeah.. it's bad. Names are hard ok.