Well in your specific application it appears that option 2 and 3 are very similar (with regards to frequency of execution) so the added system resources being chewed up by a deamon running constantly in the background does not outweight the need to be real time. I would go with number 2. This option for your scenerio will be most practical, applicable and resource friendly.

If you fell the need to be almost real time you can setup a cron job to run every minute and check the target files and still be more efficient than a running app in the background. Even if a running app does this very thing (meaning run at startup and poll the file every 60 seconds then sleep for 60 seconds and do it again) it is still using system resources while sleeping.