instant conky update

[JohnFinn]

I came up with the following logic to have conky update instantly on a file change

#!/bin/bash
inotifywait --event modify ~/todo.txt
todo.sh -p list

execi 1 ~/.config/conky/foo.sh

however conky won't start before the file is modified. Is there a way to tell conky to start before script executed the first time, so at least other things are shown?

[Caellian]

yes, you can start conky first:

#!/bin/bash

# Start conky and capture its PID
conky &
CONKY_PID=$!

# Function to clean up on exit
cleanup() {
    echo "Stopping conky (PID: $CONKY_PID)..."
    kill "$CONKY_PID" 2>/dev/null
    exit
}

# Set trap to ensure cleanup on exit or interrupt
trap cleanup EXIT INT TERM

# Monitor ~/todo.txt for changes
echo "Monitoring ~/todo.txt for changes..."
while inotifywait --event modify ~/todo.txt; do
    echo "File changed, sending signal to conky..."
    kill -SIGHUP "$CONKY_PID"
done

I was thinking about adding fsnotify functionality directly to conky, but I guess this works for now.

[JohnFinn]

I'm now experimenting with

ppidfile=/tmp/.conky-todotxt
invocation_id="$(ps -p $PPID -o pid,lstart --no-headers)"
if [ -e $ppidfile ] && [ "$(cat $ppidfile)" == "$invocation_id" ]; then
  inotifywait ~/todo.txt > /dev/null
else
  echo "$invocation_id" > $ppidfile
fi
todo.sh -p list

this makes my setup work when doing systemctl --user restart conky.service without modifying conky starting logic.
But somehow it still doesn't work after rebooting. Looks like the ppidfile gets updated but conky window still doesn't show up