[marios]

I think inotify is broken. If 'broken' is too strong a word, then it's at the very least misnamed.

It stands for inode notify, except there are edge cases where it doesn't actually report inode events. Consider this scenario:

  cd /tmp
  mkdir test
  touch test/somefile
  ln test/somefile linktothefile
  inotifywait -m test

Basically, you're monitoring a directory that contains a single file. There's also a hard link to the file, but it's outside of the watched directory. Since it's a hard link, they have the same inode number (you can verify this with ls -i).

If you append data to the file using the "test/somefile" reference, inotify reports the events as expected. If you do the same through the hard link, you get nothing. IMO this is wrong since you accessed the inode. inotify is more of a "report events on a file/directory" rather than a "report events on inode" mechanism.

[merb]

OT: well that problem is outlined in some articles about inotify. Probably most people don't care. Since they only want to watch a directory and their subdirectories and not edits from hard links.