inotifywait not performing the while loop in bash script - linux

Question

I want to put a file watcher on a directory in my Docker container. I'm using entrypoint.sh script to setup the script that places a file watcher. The setup is like so:
#!/bin/sh
# Trigger the script with the file watcher in the background
./bin/watcher.sh &
And the watcher.sh script contains the inotifywait command:
#!/bin/sh
inotifywait \
--event create --event delete \
--event modify --event move \
--format "%e %w%f" \
--monitor --outfile '/var/log/inotifywait.log' \
--syslog --quiet --recursive \
/etc/haproxy |
while read CHANGED;
do
echo "$CHANGED"
haproxy -W -db -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg -p /var/run/haproxy.pid -sf $(cat /var/run/haproxy.pid) &
done
However, although the watcher is listed when i check with top, and it reports changes in the defined log file, the loop never triggers. I've tried debugging the loop with simple:
touch /var/log/special.log
echo "${CHANGED}" >> /var/log/special.log
But file never gets created, and nothing gets echoed in it. What is the right way to use inotifywait with loop in bash script?

Answer 1

You are explicitly sending output to a file rather than stdout using the --outfile option. Nothing is ever written to stdout, so the read statement in your while loop never reads any data.
You probably want:
inotifywait \
--event create --event delete \
--event modify --event move \
--format "%e %w%f" \
--monitor \
--syslog --quiet --recursive \
/etc/haproxy |
while read CHANGED;
do
echo "$CHANGED"
haproxy -W -db -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg -p /var/run/haproxy.pid -sf $(cat /var/run/haproxy.pid) &
done