or to monitor directories.
When a directory is monitored, inotify will return events
for the directory itself, and for files inside the directory.
-.PP
+.P
The following system calls are used with this API:
.IP \[bu] 3
.BR inotify_init (2)
the underlying object and its resources are
freed for reuse by the kernel;
all associated watches are automatically freed.
-.PP
+.P
With careful programming,
an application can use inotify to efficiently monitor and cache
the state of a set of filesystem objects.
.BR EINTR ;
see
.BR signal (7)).
-.PP
+.P
Each successful
.BR read (2)
returns a buffer containing one or more of the following structures:
-.PP
+.P
.in +4n
.EX
struct inotify_event {
};
.EE
.in
-.PP
+.P
.I wd
identifies the watch for which this event occurs.
It is one of the watch descriptors returned by a previous call to
.BR inotify_add_watch (2).
-.PP
+.P
.I mask
contains bits that describe the event that occurred (see below).
-.PP
+.P
.I cookie
is a unique integer that connects related events.
Currently, this is used only for rename events, and
For all other event types,
.I cookie
is set to 0.
-.PP
+.P
The
.I name
field is present only when an event is returned
This filename is null-terminated,
and may include further null bytes (\[aq]\e0\[aq])
to align subsequent reads to a suitable address boundary.
-.PP
+.P
The
.I len
field counts all of the bytes in
.I inotify_event
structure is thus
.IR "sizeof(struct inotify_event)+len" .
-.PP
+.P
The behavior when the buffer given to
.BR read (2)
is too small to return information about the next event depends
fails with the error
.BR EINVAL .
Specifying a buffer of size
-.PP
+.P
.in +4n
.EX
sizeof(struct inotify_event) + NAME_MAX + 1
.EE
.in
-.PP
+.P
will be sufficient to read at least one event.
.SS inotify events
The
.BR IN_OPEN " (*)"
File or directory was opened.
.RE
-.PP
+.P
Inotify monitoring is inode-based: when monitoring a file
(but not when monitoring the directory containing a file),
an event can be generated for activity on any link to the file
(in the same or a different directory).
-.PP
+.P
When monitoring a directory:
.IP \[bu] 3
the events marked above with an asterisk (*) can occur both
.IP \[bu]
the events marked with a plus sign (+) occur only for objects
inside the directory (not for the directory itself).
-.PP
+.P
.IR Note :
when monitoring a directory,
events are not generated for the files inside the directory
when the events are performed via a pathname (i.e., a link)
that lies outside the monitored directory.
-.PP
+.P
When events are generated for objects inside a watched directory, the
.I name
field in the returned
.I inotify_event
structure identifies the name of the file within the directory.
-.PP
+.P
The
.B IN_ALL_EVENTS
macro is defined as a bit mask of all of the above events.
.I mask
argument when calling
.BR inotify_add_watch (2).
-.PP
+.P
Two additional convenience macros are defined:
.RS 4
.TP
Equates to
.BR "IN_CLOSE_WRITE | IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE" .
.RE
-.PP
+.P
The following further bits can be specified in
.I mask
when calling
.BR inotify_add_watch (2)
without this flag may clobber existing watch masks.
.RE
-.PP
+.P
The following bits may be set in the
.I mask
field returned by
and
.IR dir/myfile .
.RE
-.PP
+.P
Suppose an application is watching the directories
.I dir1
and
.I cookie
value.
.RE
-.PP
+.P
Suppose that
.I dir1/xx
and
event for
.IR dir1 .
.RE
-.PP
+.P
Suppose an application is watching the directory
.I dir
and (the empty) directory
and
.BR epoll (7).
When an event is available, the file descriptor indicates as readable.
-.PP
+.P
Since Linux 2.6.25,
signal-driven I/O notification is available for inotify file descriptors;
see the discussion of
.B POLLIN
is set in
.IR si_band .
-.PP
+.P
If successive output inotify events produced on the
inotify file descriptor are identical (same
.IR wd ,
This reduces the amount of kernel memory required for the event queue,
but also means that an application can't use inotify to reliably count
file events.
-.PP
+.P
The events returned by reading from an inotify file descriptor
form an ordered queue.
Thus, for example, it is guaranteed that when renaming from
one directory to another, events will be produced in the
correct order on the inotify file descriptor.
-.PP
+.P
The set of watch descriptors that is being monitored via
an inotify file descriptor can be viewed via the entry for
the inotify file descriptor in the process's
way for a process that is monitoring events via inotify
to distinguish events that it triggers
itself from those that are triggered by other processes.
-.PP
+.P
Inotify reports only events that a user-space program triggers through
the filesystem API.
As a result, it does not catch remote events that occur
and
.I /dev/pts
are not monitorable with inotify.
-.PP
+.P
The inotify API does not report file accesses and modifications that
may occur because of
.BR mmap (2),
.BR msync (2),
and
.BR munmap (2).
-.PP
+.P
The inotify API identifies affected files by filename.
However, by the time an application processes an inotify event,
the filename may already have been deleted or renamed.
-.PP
+.P
The inotify API identifies events via watch descriptors.
It is the application's responsibility to cache a mapping
(if one is needed) between watch descriptors and pathnames.
Be aware that directory renamings may affect multiple cached pathnames.
-.PP
+.P
Inotify monitoring of directories is not recursive:
to monitor subdirectories under a directory,
additional watches must be created.
This can take a significant amount time for large directory trees.
-.PP
+.P
If monitoring an entire directory subtree,
and a new subdirectory is created in that tree or an existing directory
is renamed into that tree,
Therefore, you may want to scan the contents of the subdirectory
immediately after adding the watch (and, if desired,
recursively add watches for any subdirectories that it contains).
-.PP
+.P
Note that the event queue can overflow.
In this case, events are lost.
Robust applications should handle the possibility of
create a new inotify file descriptor,
and then re-create watches and cache entries
for the objects to be monitored.)
-.PP
+.P
If a filesystem is mounted on top of a monitored directory,
no event is generated, and no events are generated
for objects immediately under the new mount point.
.BR rename (2)
can be matched up via their shared cookie value.
However, the task of matching has some challenges.
-.PP
+.P
These two events are usually consecutive in the event stream available
when reading from the inotify file descriptor.
However, this is not guaranteed.
has appeared, but the
.B IN_MOVED_TO
has not.
-.PP
+.P
Matching up the
.B IN_MOVED_FROM
and
the watch descriptors in any pending events.
(Re-creating the inotify file descriptor and rebuilding the cache may
be useful to deal with this scenario.)
-.PP
+.P
Applications should also allow for the possibility that the
.B IN_MOVED_FROM
event was the last event that could fit in the buffer
generate
.B IN_MODIFY
events.
-.PP
+.P
.\" FIXME . kernel commit 611da04f7a31b2208e838be55a42c7a1310ae321
.\" implies that unmount events were buggy since Linux 2.6.11 to Linux 2.6.36
.\"
.B IN_ONESHOT
.I mask
flag does not work.
-.PP
+.P
As originally designed and implemented, the
.B IN_ONESHOT
flag did not cause an
since Linux 2.6.36, an
.B IN_IGNORED
event is generated in this case.
-.PP
+.P
Before Linux 2.6.25,
.\" commit 1c17d18e3775485bf1e0ce79575eb637a94494a2
the kernel code that was intended to coalesce successive identical events
instead checked if the most recent event could be coalesced with the
.I oldest
unread event.
-.PP
+.P
When a watch descriptor is removed by calling
.BR inotify_rm_watch (2)
(or because a watch file is deleted or the filesystem
.BR IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE ,
and
.BR IN_CLOSE_WRITE .
-.PP
+.P
The following output was recorded while editing the file
.I /home/user/temp/foo
and listing directory
.BR read (2),
.BR stat (2),
.BR fanotify (7)
-.PP
+.P
.I Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt
in the Linux kernel source tree
projects / thirdparty / man-pages.git / blobdiff