man2/inotify_init.2

   1 .\" Copyright (C) 2005 Robert Love
   2 .\" and Copyright (C) 2008, Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
   3 .\"
   4 .\" SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
   5 .\"
   6 .\" 2005-07-19 Robert Love <rlove@rlove.org> - initial version
   7 .\" 2006-02-07 mtk, minor changes
   8 .\" 2008-10-10 mtk: add description of inotify_init1()
   9 .\"
  10 .TH INOTIFY_INIT 2 2020-04-11 "Linux man-pages (unreleased)" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
  11 .SH NAME
  12 inotify_init, inotify_init1 \- initialize an inotify instance
  13 .SH LIBRARY
  14 Standard C library
  15 .RI ( libc ", " \-lc )
  16 .SH SYNOPSIS
  17 .nf
  18 .B #include <sys/inotify.h>
  19 .PP
  20 .B "int inotify_init(void);"
  21 .BI "int inotify_init1(int " flags );
  22 .fi
  23 .SH DESCRIPTION
  24 For an overview of the inotify API, see
  25 .BR inotify (7).
  26 .PP
  27 .BR inotify_init ()
  28 initializes a new inotify instance and returns a file descriptor associated
  29 with a new inotify event queue.
  30 .PP
  31 If
  32 .I flags
  33 is 0, then
  34 .BR inotify_init1 ()
  35 is the same as
  36 .BR inotify_init ().
  37 The following values can be bitwise ORed in
  38 .I flags
  39 to obtain different behavior:
  40 .TP
  41 .B IN_NONBLOCK
  42 Set the
  43 .B O_NONBLOCK
  44 file status flag on the open file description (see
  45 .BR open (2))
  46 referred to by the new file descriptor.
  47 Using this flag saves extra calls to
  48 .BR fcntl (2)
  49 to achieve the same result.
  50 .TP
  51 .B IN_CLOEXEC
  52 Set the close-on-exec
  53 .RB ( FD_CLOEXEC )
  54 flag on the new file descriptor.
  55 See the description of the
  56 .B O_CLOEXEC
  57 flag in
  58 .BR open (2)
  59 for reasons why this may be useful.
  60 .SH RETURN VALUE
  61 On success, these system calls return a new file descriptor.
  62 On error, \-1 is returned, and
  63 .I errno
  64 is set to indicate the error.
  65 .SH ERRORS
  66 .TP
  67 .B EINVAL
  68 .RB ( inotify_init1 ())
  69 An invalid value was specified in
  70 .IR flags .
  71 .TP
  72 .B EMFILE
  73 The user limit on the total number of inotify instances has been reached.
  74 .TP
  75 .B EMFILE
  76 The per-process limit on the number of open file descriptors has been reached.
  77 .TP
  78 .B ENFILE
  79 The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has been reached.
  80 .TP
  81 .B ENOMEM
  82 Insufficient kernel memory is available.
  83 .SH VERSIONS
  84 .BR inotify_init ()
  85 first appeared in Linux 2.6.13;
  86 library support was added to glibc in version 2.4.
  87 .BR inotify_init1 ()
  88 was added in Linux 2.6.27;
  89 library support was added to glibc in version 2.9.
  90 .SH STANDARDS
  91 These system calls are Linux-specific.
  92 .SH SEE ALSO
  93 .BR inotify_add_watch (2),
  94 .BR inotify_rm_watch (2),
  95 .BR inotify (7)