|
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OUTPUT | OPTIONS | EXIT STATUS | EVENTS | EXAMPLES | BUGS | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
inotifywait(1) General Commands Manual inotifywait(1)
inotifywait - wait for changes to files using inotify
inotifywait [-hcmrq] [-e <event> ] [-t <seconds> ] [--format <fmt> ]
[--timefmt <fmt> ] <file> [ ... ]
inotifywait efficiently waits for changes to files using Linux's
inotify(7) interface. It is suitable for waiting for changes to
files from shell scripts. It can either exit once an event occurs,
or continually execute and output events as they occur.
inotifywait will output diagnostic information on standard error and
event information on standard output. The event output can be
configured, but by default it consists of lines of the following
form:
watched_filename EVENT_NAMES event_filename
watched_filename
is the name of the file on which the event occurred. If the
file is a directory, a trailing slash is output.
EVENT_NAMES
are the names of the inotify events which occurred, separated
by commas.
event_filename
is output only when the event occurred on a directory, and in
this case the name of the file within the directory which
caused this event is output.
By default, any special characters in filenames are not
escaped in any way. This can make the output of inotifywait
difficult to parse in awk scripts or similar. The --csv and
--format options will be helpful in this case.
-h, --help
Output some helpful usage information.
@<file>
When watching a directory tree recursively, exclude the
specified file from being watched. The file must be specified
with a relative or absolute path according to whether a
relative or absolute path is given for watched directories.
If a specific path is explicitly both included and excluded,
it will always be watched.
Note: If you need to watch a directory or file whose name
starts with @, give the absolute path.
--fromfile <file>
Read filenames to watch or exclude from a file, one filename
per line. If filenames begin with @ they are excluded as
described above. If <file> is `-', filenames are read from
standard input. Use this option if you need to watch too many
files to pass in as command line arguments.
-m, --monitor
Instead of exiting after receiving a single event, execute
indefinitely. The default behaviour is to exit after the
first event occurs.
-d, --daemon
Same as --monitor, except run in the background logging events
to a file that must be specified by --outfile. Implies
--syslog.
-o, --outfile <file>
Output events to <file> rather than stdout.
-s, --syslog
Output errors to syslog(3) system log module rather than
stderr.
-r, --recursive
Watch all subdirectories of any directories passed as
arguments. Watches will be set up recursively to an unlimited
depth. Symbolic links are not traversed. Newly created
subdirectories will also be watched.
Warning: If you use this option while watching the root
directory of a large tree, it may take quite a while until all
inotify watches are established, and events will not be
received in this time. Also, since one inotify watch will be
established per subdirectory, it is possible that the maximum
amount of inotify watches per user will be reached. The
default maximum is 8192; it can be increased by writing to
/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches.
-q, --quiet
If specified once, the program will be less verbose.
Specifically, it will not state when it has completed
establishing all inotify watches.
If specified twice, the program will output nothing at all,
except in the case of fatal errors.
--exclude <pattern>
Do not process any events whose filename matches the specified
POSIX extended regular expression, case sensitive.
--excludei <pattern>
Do not process any events whose filename matches the specified
POSIX extended regular expression, case insensitive.
-t <seconds>, --timeout <seconds>
Exit if an appropriate event has not occurred within <seconds>
seconds. If <seconds> is zero (the default), wait indefinitely
for an event.
-e <event>, --event <event>
Listen for specific event(s) only. The events which can be
listened for are listed in the EVENTS section. This option
can be specified more than once. If omitted, all events are
listened for.
-c, --csv
Output in CSV (comma-separated values) format. This is useful
when filenames may contain spaces, since in this case it is
not safe to simply split the output at each space character.
--timefmt <fmt>
Set a time format string as accepted by strftime(3) for use
with the `%T' conversion in the --format option.
--format <fmt>
Output in a user-specified format, using printf-like syntax.
The event strings output are limited to around 4000 characters
and will be truncated to this length. The following
conversions are supported:
%w This will be replaced with the name of the Watched file on
which an event occurred.
%f When an event occurs within a directory, this will be replaced
with the name of the File which caused the event to occur.
Otherwise, this will be replaced with an empty string.
%e Replaced with the Event(s) which occurred, comma-separated.
%Xe Replaced with the Event(s) which occurred, separated by
whichever character is in the place of `X'.
%T Replaced with the current Time in the format specified by the
--timefmt option, which should be a format string suitable for
passing to strftime(3).
0 The program executed successfully, and an event occurred which
was being listened for.
1 An error occurred in execution of the program, or an event
occurred which was not being listened for. The latter
generally occurs if something happens which forcibly removes
the inotify watch, such as a watched file being deleted or the
filesystem containing a watched file being unmounted.
2 The -t option was used and an event did not occur in the
specified interval of time.
The following events are valid for use with the -e option:
access A watched file or a file within a watched directory was read
from.
modify A watched file or a file within a watched directory was
written to.
attrib The metadata of a watched file or a file within a watched
directory was modified. This includes timestamps, file
permissions, extended attributes etc.
close_write
A watched file or a file within a watched directory was
closed, after being opened in writeable mode. This does not
necessarily imply the file was written to.
close_nowrite
A watched file or a file within a watched directory was
closed, after being opened in read-only mode.
close A watched file or a file within a watched directory was
closed, regardless of how it was opened. Note that this is
actually implemented simply by listening for both close_write
and close_nowrite, hence all close events received will be
output as one of these, not CLOSE.
open A watched file or a file within a watched directory was
opened.
moved_to
A file or directory was moved into a watched directory. This
event occurs even if the file is simply moved from and to the
same directory.
moved_from
A file or directory was moved from a watched directory. This
event occurs even if the file is simply moved from and to the
same directory.
move A file or directory was moved from or to a watched directory.
Note that this is actually implemented simply by listening for
both moved_to and moved_from, hence all close events received
will be output as one or both of these, not MOVE.
move_self
A watched file or directory was moved. After this event, the
file or directory is no longer being watched.
create A file or directory was created within a watched directory.
delete A file or directory within a watched directory was deleted.
delete_self
A watched file or directory was deleted. After this event the
file or directory is no longer being watched. Note that this
event can occur even if it is not explicitly being listened
for.
unmount
The filesystem on which a watched file or directory resides
was unmounted. After this event the file or directory is no
longer being watched. Note that this event can occur even if
it is not explicitly being listened to.
Example 1
Running inotifywait at the command-line to wait for any file in the
`test' directory to be accessed. After running inotifywait, `cat
test/foo' is run in a separate console.
% inotifywait test
Setting up watches.
Watches established.
test/ ACCESS foo
Example 2
A short shell script to efficiently wait for httpd-related log
messages and do something appropriate.
#!/bin/sh
while inotifywait -e modify /var/log/messages; do
if tail -n1 /var/log/messages | grep httpd; then
kdialog --msgbox "Apache needs love!"
fi
done
Example 3
A custom output format is used to watch `~/test'. Meanwhile, someone
runs `touch ~/test/badfile; touch ~/test/goodfile; rm ~/test/badfile'
in another console.
% inotifywait -m -r --format '%:e %f' ~/test
Setting up watches. Beware: since -r was given, this may take a while!
Watches established.
CREATE badfile
OPEN badfile
ATTRIB badfile
CLOSE_WRITE:CLOSE badfile
CREATE goodfile
OPEN goodfile
ATTRIB goodfile
CLOSE_WRITE:CLOSE goodfile
DELETE badfile
There are race conditions in the recursive directory watching code
which can cause events to be missed if they occur in a directory
immediately after that directory is created. This is probably not
fixable.
It is assumed the inotify event queue will never overflow.
inotifywait is written and maintained by Rohan McGovern
<rohan@mcgovern.id.au>.
inotifywait is part of inotify-tools. The inotify-tools website is
located at: http://inotify-tools.sourceforge.net/
inotifywatch(1), strftime(3), inotify(7)
This page is part of the inotify-tools (command-line programs
providing a simple interface to inotify) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki⟩. If you have a bug
report for this manual page, send it to
inotify-tools-general@lists.sourceforge.net. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools.git⟩ on 2017-07-05. If
you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the
page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in
this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
mail to man-pages@man7.org
inotifywait 3.14 July 05, 2017 inotifywait(1)
Pages that refer to this page: inotify(7)