however my googling attempts haven't return satisfactory results?
Maybe I'm not searching for the right keywords? How do people with legacy systems, that receive text files through FTP, process each file through a pipeline of work in a reliable way?
Also apparently systemd can do something like this. "DirectoryNotEmpty= may be used to watch a directory and activate the configured unit whenever it contains at least one file." https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.pat...
The keyword is inotify since that's the (Linux) API that allows watching files/directories.