General :: Execute A Command Every Time A "folder Changes Status"?

is there any way to execute a command every time a "folder changes status"? Under windows there's an API which pro-actively tells you when something has changed within a directory, so I was trying to achieve something similar under Linux. I can't think anything else other than check the list of files and parameters (e.g. date/size/owner) every few seconds, but that's not ideal of course... So what I'm asking here is: is there is a way to set linux to tell me rather than me go and check?