mjhjmtu

Suppose I have a file images.txt which contains for example

image1.jpg
image2.jpg
image3.jpg

Then I pipe the images.txt to sxiv and I want that the thumbnail view reflects the changes immediately. I tried this one:

watch -n 0.1 'cat images.txt | sxiv -i -t'

But if I change the images.txt and save it (for example by adding or removing an image-filename), the thumbnail view in sxiv doesn't update.

I guess that there is something wrong with my pipe construction. What would be the correct way to do this?

Your existing construction will attempt to run cat images.txt | sxiv -i -t every tenth of a second. If sxiv takes longer than that to do whatever it does, things could get quite messy. You might be better off looking at a hash of a checksum of all of the images:

$ md5sum *.jpg | md5sum
4a009e73fb133d2d103dd2e65ef8c605 -

This takes a hash of all of the .jpg files, and makes a hash of that. This means that the sur-checksum will change if any of the images are changes, as well as if any are added or removed.

So we can do something like this:

#!/bin/bash
old_checksum="$(md5sum *.jpg | md5sum)"
while /bin/true; do
 new_checksum="$(md5sum *.jpg | md5sum)"
 if [[ "$new_checksum" != "$old_checksum" ]]; then
 old_checksum="$new_checksum"
 find . -maxdepth 1 -name *.jpg -print0 | xargs -0 sxiv -i -t
 fi
 sleep 1
done

Anytime anything changes, take a note of the new checksum, and re-run sxiv.

If you still want to keep your catalog of .jpg files in images.txt, this can be easily modified to use the contents of that file for creating the checksum and for providing arguments to xargs in lieu of find.