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  • Robert Love's avatar
    [PATCH] inotify · 0eeca283
    Robert Love authored
    
    
    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: default avatarRobert Love <rml@novell.com>
    Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
    Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    0eeca283