19MONITORING FILE EVENTS
Some applications need to be able to monitor files or directories in order to determine whether events have occurred for the monitored objects. For example, a graphical file manager needs to be able to determine when files are added or removed from the directory that is currently being displayed, or a daemon may want to monitor its configuration file in order to know if the file has been changed.
Starting with kernel 2.6.13, Linux provides the inotify mechanism, which allows an application to monitor file events. This chapter describes the use of inotify.
The inotify mechanism replaces an older mechanism, dnotify, which provided a subset of the functionality of inotify. We describe dnotify briefly at the end of this chapter, ...
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