Or even use incrond [0], and get it call your script that does whatever needs to be done with the modified files.
[0] http://linux.die.net/man/8/incrond
EDIT: As a use case example I use this to detect when a new cert request is made to my Puppet master server. Once a CSR file is created, I check if the host is created by our provisioning system, and if so, then sign it.
EDIT2: This will eventually go into 3.4.0 - https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/7244