Milinda Pathirage’s Blog

inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem which monitors Linux file system operations, such as read, write, create and delete. It was included in the mainline kernel from release 2.6.13 (June 18, 2005). It is more efficient than busy polling from a corn job and it's an extensions to Linux file system to capture the file system changes. And it'll report these changes to applications like Desktop Search Utilities(Beagle).

You can use inotify API in your C programs to track the file system changes and 'Monitor file system activity with inotify' article from IBM Developerworks is a good starting point if you need to learn more about inotify.

inotify scripting language bindings available for popular scripting languages like Python, Perl, Ruby and PHP. Also there are bindings for Java and C++ also.

Here is the list of language bindings for inotify.

• Pyinotify
• Low level inotify wrapper using Python
• High level inotify wrapper using Python
• inotify-java
• inotify-cxx
• inotify OCaml
• Hinotify (Haskell)
• PHP inotify
• Ruby-inotify