inotify-tools is a set of utilities for monitoring file or folder changes (access, modification, and more events).

The main utility is called inotifywait. As you can imagine, this program waits until a file or folder has changed in some way. Then, it exits or it continues executing until killed. It’s useful in scripts, when you want something happens when a file is modified.

inotifywait [<options>] <file or folder>

Table of Contents

Options

Some of the options are:

  • -e <event>: specify an event, like access, modify, close, open and more.
  • -t <seconds>: exit if no event has ocurred within <seconds>.
  • -r: recursive mode, look for changes on all subdirectories of the folder passed as argument to inotifywait.
  • -m: monitor, continues executing after receiving events.
  • Check man page for more.

Examples

  • A simple command that will exits when an event happens. 
    $ inotifywait test.csv
Setting up watches.
Watches established.
OPEN

  • This process will continue until manually killed.

    $ inotifywait -m test.csv 
Setting up watches.
Watches established.
 OPEN 
 CLOSE_NOWRITE,CLOSE 
 OPEN 
 ACCESS 
 ACCESS 
 CLOSE_NOWRITE,CLOSE

  • This is a script that listens for file modification and syncs the file with a cloud storage (in this case, AWS S3).

    #!/bin/bash

synchronize_file(){
  inotifywait -e modify /home/user/Documents/file.txt
  aws s3 cp /home/user/Documents/file.txt s3://mybucket/file.txt && synchronize_file
}

synhronize_file

Troubleshooting

  • In older versions, inotifywait exits with an exit code of 1 but there are no errors. The program can also exits with this exit code when you specify the modify event with the -e parameter and you modify the file. I don’t know why, because if you specify another event like open, it will exit with an exit code of 0 (if you open the watched file).

If you have any suggestion, feel free to contact me via social media or email.