Learn how to use inotify functions for a simple monitoring app. Download the sample code and Use inotify when you need efficient, fine-grained, asynchronous monitoring of Linux file system events. Use it for user-space monitoring for security, performance, or other purposes.
So now a caller can monitor a subtree in Linux, in 2010. NT allowed this in 1993 (see FindFirstChangeNotification, extended in Windows 2000 by ReadDirectoryChanges.)
When will there be a persistent change log (eg FSCTL_READ_USN_JOURNAL)?
inotify has been in the mainline Linux kernel since 2005. dnotify was around long before that. The fact that this article is new does not mean that inotify is new.
iNotify is interesting anyone heard of kqueue ?
http://people.freebsd.org/~jlemon/kqueue_slides/index.html
http://blog.julipedia.org/2004/10/example-of-kqueue.html
http://wiki.netbsd.se/kqueue_tutorial
True, and IIRC kqueue was added to Mac OS X a few years ago as well. What ever the case maybe, I don’t want to start a flame war but it seems that in the Linux world very little time is paid to logically planing something – instead there seems to be a haphazard approach of throwing things against the wall and seeing which one sticks. It may get able to get the features into the operating system quickly but in the long run when many are dependent on it there are problems. HAL is the best example of a noble idea turned into a horrible frankstein and it has been almost a year since libudev been pushed as an alternative and still many projects are reliant on HAL.
You can do some interesting things with bash the inotify-tools package (for those not inclined to low-level programming). One example I posted here: http://serenadetoacuckooo.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-time-log-file-w…