INOTIFY(7)

NAME
inotify - monitoring file system events

DESCRIPTION
The inotify API provides a mechanism for monitoring file system events. Inotify can be used to monitor individual files, or to monitor directories. When a directory is monitored, inotify will return events for the directory itself, and for files inside the directory.

The following system calls are used with this API: inotify_init(2) (or inotify_init1(2)), inotify_add_watch(2), inotify_rm_watch(2), read(2), and close(2).

inotify_init(2) creates an inotify instance and returns a file descriptor referring to the inotify instance. The more recent inotify_init1(2) is like inotify_init(2), but provides some extra functionality.

inotify_add_watch(2) manipulates the "watch list" associated with an inotify instance. Each item ("watch") in the watch list specifies the pathname of a file or directory, along with some set of events that the kernel should monitor for the file referred to by that pathname. inotify_add_watch(2) either creates a new watch item, or modifies an existing watch. Each watch has a unique "watch descriptor", an integer returned by inotify_add_watch(2) when the watch is created.

inotify_rm_watch(2) removes an item from an inotify watch list.

When all file descriptors referring to an inotify instance have been closed, the underlying object and its resources are freed for reuse by the kernel; all associated watches are automatically freed.

To determine what events have occurred, an application read(2)s from the inotify file descriptor. If no events have so far occurred, then, assuming a blocking file descriptor, read(2) will block until at least one event occurs (unless interrupted by a signal, in which case the call fails with the error EINTR; see signal(7)).

Each successful read(2) returns a buffer containing one or more of the following structures:

struct inotify_event {
    int      wd;       /* Watch descriptor */
    uint32_t mask;     /* Mask of events */
    uint32_t cookie;   /* Unique cookie associating related
                          events (for rename(2)) */
    uint32_t len;      /* Size of name field */
    char     name[];   /* Optional null-terminated name */
};

wd identifies the watch for which this event occurs. It is one of the watch descriptors returned by a previous call to inotify_add_watch(2).

mask contains bits that describe the event that occurred (see below).

cookie is a unique integer that connects related events. Currently this is only used for rename events, and allows the resulting pair of IN_MOVED_FROM and IN_MOVED_TO events to be connected by the application. For all other event types, cookie is set to 0.

The name field is only present when an event is returned for a file inside a watched directory; it identifies the file pathname relative to the watched directory. This pathname is null-terminated, and may include further null bytes to align subsequent reads to a suitable address boundary.

The len field counts all of the bytes in name, including the null bytes; the length of each inotify_event structure is thus sizeof(struct inotify_event)+len.

The behavior when the buffer given to read(2) is too small to return information about the next event depends on the kernel version: in kernels before 2.6.21, read(2) returns 0; since kernel 2.6.21, read(2) fails with the error EINVAL. Specifying a buffer of size

    sizeof(struct inotify_event) + NAME_MAX + 1

will be sufficient to read at least one event.

  inotify events
The inotify_add_watch(2) mask argument and the mask field of the inotify_event structure returned when read(2)ing an inotify file descriptor are both bit masks identifying inotify events. The following bits can be specified in mask when calling inotify_add_watch(2) and may be returned in the mask field returned by read(2):

    IN_ACCESS
        File was accessed (read) (*).
    IN_ATTRIB
        Metadata changed, e.g., permissions, timestamps, extended attributes, link count (since Linux 2.6.25), UID, GID, etc. (*).
    IN_CLOSE_WRITE
        File opened for writing was closed (*).
    IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE
        File not opened for writing was closed (*).
    IN_CREATE
        File/directory created in watched directory (*).
    IN_DELETE
        File/directory deleted from watched directory (*).
    IN_DELETE_SELF
        Watched file/directory was itself deleted.
    IN_MODIFY
        File was modified (*).
    IN_MOVE_SELF
        Watched file/directory was itself moved.
    IN_MOVED_FROM
        File moved out of watched directory (*).
    IN_MOVED_TO
        File moved into watched directory (*).
    IN_OPEN
        File was opened (*).

When monitoring a directory, the events marked with an asterisk (*) above can occur for files in the directory, in which case the name field in the returned inotify_event structure identifies the name of the file within the directory.

The IN_ALL_EVENTS macro is defined as a bit mask of all of the above events. This macro can be used as the mask argument when calling inotify_add_watch(2).

Two additional convenience macros are IN_MOVE, which equates to IN_MOVED_FROM|IN_MOVED_TO, and IN_CLOSE, which equates to IN_CLOSE_WRITE|IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE.

The following further bits can be specified in mask when calling inotify_add_watch(2):

    IN_DONT_FOLLOW (since Linux 2.6.15)
        Don't dereference pathname if it is a symbolic link.
    IN_EXCL_UNLINK (since Linux 2.6.36)
        By default, when watching events on the children of a directory, events are generated for children even after they have been unlinked from the directory. This can result in large numbers of uninteresting events for some applications (e.g., if watching /tmp, in which many applications create temporary files whose names are immediately unlinked). Specifying IN_EXCL_UNLINK changes the default behavior, so that events are not generated for children after they have been unlinked from the watched directory.
    IN_MASK_ADD
        Add (OR) events to watch mask for this pathname if it already exists (instead of replacing mask).
    IN_ONESHOT
        Monitor pathname for one event, then remove from watch list.
    IN_ONLYDIR (since Linux 2.6.15)
        Only watch pathname if it is a directory.

The following bits may be set in the mask field returned by read(2):

    IN_IGNORED
        Watch was removed explicitly (inotify_rm_watch(2)) or automatically (file was deleted, or file system was unmounted).
    IN_ISDIR
        Subject of this event is a directory.
    IN_Q_OVERFLOW
        Event queue overflowed (wd is -1 for this event).
    IN_UNMOUNT
        File system containing watched object was unmounted.

  /proc interfaces
The following interfaces can be used to limit the amount of kernel memory consumed by inotify:

/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events
    The value in this file is used when an application calls inotify_init(2) to set an upper limit on the number of events that can be queued to the corresponding inotify instance. Events in excess of this limit are dropped, but an IN_Q_OVERFLOW event is always generated.

/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances
    This specifies an upper limit on the number of inotify instances that can be created per real user ID.

/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
    This specifies an upper limit on the number of watches that can be created per real user ID.

VERSIONS
Inotify was merged into the 2.6.13 Linux kernel. The required library interfaces were added to glibc in version 2.4. (IN_DONT_FOLLOW, IN_MASK_ADD, and IN_ONLYDIR were only added in version 2.5.)

CONFORMING TO
The inotify API is Linux-specific.

NOTES
Inotify file descriptors can be monitored using select(2), poll(2), and epoll(7). When an event is available, the file descriptor indicates as readable.

Since Linux 2.6.25, signal-driven I/O notification is available for inotify file descriptors; see the discussion of F_SETFL (for setting the O_ASYNC flag), F_SETOWN, and F_SETSIG in fcntl(2). The siginfo_t structure (described in sigaction(2)) that is passed to the signal handler has the following fields set: si_fd is set to the inotify file descriptor number; si_signo is set to the signal number; si_code is set to POLL_IN; and POLLIN is set in si_band.

If successive output inotify events produced on the inotify file descriptor are identical (same wd, mask, cookie, and name) then they are coalesced into a single event if the older event has not yet been read (but see BUGS).

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.

The FIONREAD ioctl(2) returns the number of bytes available to read from an inotify file descriptor.

  Limitations and caveats
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.

The inotify API provides no information about the user or process that triggered the inotify event. In particular, there is no easy 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.

Note that the event queue can overflow. In this case, events are lost. Robust applications should handle the possibility of lost events gracefully.

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.

If monitoring an entire directory subtree, and a new subdirectory is created in that tree, be aware that by the time you create a watch for the new subdirectory, new files may already have been created in the subdirectory. Therefore, you may want to scan the contents of the subdirectory immediately after adding the watch.

BUGS
In kernels before 2.6.16, the IN_ONESHOT mask flag does not work.

Before kernel 2.6.25, the kernel code that was intended to coalesce successive identical events (i.e., the two most recent events could potentially be coalesced if the older had not yet been read) instead checked if the most recent event could be coalesced with the oldest unread event.

SEE ALSO
inotify_add_watch(2), inotify_init(2), inotify_init1(2), inotify_rm_watch(2), read(2), stat(2)

Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt in the Linux kernel source tree

COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.50 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.