If you want to monitor file changes in a directory on an Apple OS X/macOS system, one way to do so is using fswatch, a cross-platform file change monitor. The utility will allow you to monitor which files in the directory have been changed, though it doesn't report on the particular changes made to the content of the files. You can track the addition and deletion of files or whether files in the monitored directory are modified. On a Mac OS X system, you can install the software using the Homebrew package management system - see Installing Homebrew on Mac OS X for instructions on installing the software. Once Homebrew is installed, you can install fswatch using the command brew install fswatch in a Terminal window, which provides a command-line interface (CLI). The program will be installed in /usr/local/bin. Once it is installed, you can view help information by typing fswatch -h at a Terminal window shell prompt.

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If you need a text-based web browser that doesn't require a graphical user interface (GUI), one alternative is the Lynx browser that is available for a variety of operating systems, including Linux, OS X/macOS, DOS, and Microsoft Windows. If you have the Homebrew package management software installed on a OS X/macOS system, you can use it to easily install the Lynx browser using the command brew install lynx.

Advantages to using a text-based browser such as Lynx, in addition to it not requiring a GUI, making it suitable to be run in a Terminal window, is that it doesn't support Adobe Flash, which makes it invulnerable to malware distributed through vulnerabilities in Flash. Also, because it doesn't support JavaScript nor graphics, it prevents tracking software that uses JavaScript or web bugs, aka web beacons, which can track your web browsing activities via small graphics files that will be invisible to you on a webpage, from being used to track your browsing activities. It does support HTTP cookies, though, which are also used by sites to track visitors, but Lynx will prompt you if you want to allow cookies for a site when you visit the site and has whitelisting and blacklisting capabilities. E.g., when a site tries to place a cookie on your system, Lynx will prompt you as to whether it should be allowed. You can choose from "Y/N/Always/neVer."

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