Have you ever wanted to be informed when someone puts something into your public drop-box? OS 9 used to allow you to attach apple scripts to a folder, and have them run when the contents changed. I don't think you can do that any more! So, here's a script which will email you when your drop-box contents changes.
Read the rest of the article for the script...
Firstly, you need to set the permissions on / so that sendmail will run. Do this by typing the following in the Terminal:
chmod g-w /Otherwise, sendmail complains about the permissions of the directory structures - it's a safety feature.
chmod g-w /etc/
chmod g-w /etc/mail/
#! /bin/shObviously, you will want to replace "username" with your own username or email. If you use a username ie. fred, then make sure you're fetching UNIX mail, or the whole thing won't work. See here for info on how to set up mail.app to recieve local UNIX mail.
ls ~/Public/Drop\ Box >~/Documents/.NewDropBoxList
diff ~/Documents/.DropBoxList ~/Documents/.NewDropBoxList >/tmp/$$tmp1
if test $? -eq 1
then less /tmp/$$tmp1 | mail -s "`hostname` new dropbox items" username
fi
mv ~/Documents/.NewDropBoxList ~/Documents/.DropBoxList
echo >~/.DropBoxListand the cron job can be installed to run as often as you like. I'd suggest every 10-20 minutes, which is achieved by using */20 in the minutes column of crontab. A quick note on security: It's not a good idea to allow group-write access to files you run as a cron job, because otherwise someone can overwrite your script, and hey-presto they can run any command as you. For that reason, make sure you do the following on both the script and it's containing directory:
Enjoy ;)
chmod go-w ~/bin/CheckDropBox
chmod go-w ~/bin
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020201012212182