20 Jun, 2006
1 commit
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Update kernel documentation to include a description of the inotify
kernel API.Signed-off-by: Amy Griffis
Acked-by: Robert Love
Acked-by: John McCutchan
Signed-off-by: Al Viro
16 Jul, 2005
1 commit
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Clean up and expand some of the inotify documentation.
Signed-off-by: Robert Love
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds
13 Jul, 2005
1 commit
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inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:* dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
* dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
stat structures.
* dnotify's interface to user-space is awful. Signals?inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:* inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
* inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
you were watching is on was unmounted."
* inotify can watch directories or files.Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.
Signed-off-by: Robert Love
Cc: John McCutchan
Cc: Christoph Hellwig
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds