Question

I have some basic questions about pyinotify that I can’t seem to find the answers to elsewhere.

1) For a continuous directory monitor (and event processor) is it necessary to have a while( True ) loop or is the continuous event ‘loop’ handled by the notify watch and ended when I remove the watch?

2) What happens if files are pre-existing when the inotify instance is ‘turned-on’? Initially I just want to monitor for IN_CREATE but this won’t handle pre-existing files.

3) Similar to #2, what happens if a file gets created while I’m in my event processor function? Will pyinotify cache it in its queue and process it when the ‘loop’ starts again, or will I lose this event?

Answer 1

• is it necessary to have a while( True ) loop

You’ll need a while-loop, but it can be set up implicitly by calling the notifier.loop method:

    wm = pyinotify.WatchManager()
    mask = pyinotify.IN_CREATE
    notifier = pyinotify.Notifier(wm, MyProcessEvent(path))
    wdd = wm.add_watch(path, mask, rec=True, auto_add=True)
    notifier.loop()

If you wish to set up the while-loop yourself, you might start with this source code from notifier.loop:

    while 1:
        try:
            notifier.process_events()
            # check_events is blocking
            if notifier.check_events():
                notifier.read_events()
        except KeyboardInterrupt:
            # Stop monitoring if sigint is caught (Control-C).
            break
    notifier.stop()

To remove a watch of a particular file or directory, call wm.rm_watch.

• What happens if files are pre-existing when the inotify instance is ‘turned-on’?

  No event is generated before wm.add_watch is called.

• what happens if a file gets created while I’m in my event processor function?

  The events are queued in a buffer of size
  /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events. For example, on my system
  that number is

  % cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_queued_events
  16384
  

  If the filesystem generates enough events to fill up the buffer while
  you are processing a prior event, then you get a IN_Q_OVERFLOW
  event.

  See the comment in blucz’s answer.