How to watch files in a Git repository

["R. Diez" <rdiez1999@gmail.com>]

Hi all:

I would like to get a notification e-mail when certain files or directories change in a Git repository.

In the good old CVS days, you could just 'watch' a file with your favourite CVS GUI.

Some online services like GitHub offer their own notification mechanism, but I would like something generic. I am not looking for a hook solution, because the Git repositories may not be mine, so I may only have read access.

The idea is that I can set up a cron job to periodically pull a repository, and run a script to generate the e-mails from the commit history. Any new commits which match the desired branch and modify the desired files and/or directories would trigger the notifications.

I've searched the Web, but couldn't find anything straightforward.

If there is nothing of the sort, I could write my own script in Bash or Perl. I can handle cron and sending e-mails, but I do not know much about Git's internals. Could someone provide a few pointers about how to code this? I would expect there is some command to list commits, and all files touched by a particular commit. And there would be some way to interface with Bash or Perl, which does not need parsing complicated text output from Git.

Thanks in advance,
   rdiez