Question

Say for example you had a shell script that utilises inotifywait in the following form

inotifywait -m -e create /home/user1/*/*

Essentially you are asking it to monitor all folders two levels under user1. I’ve noticed with inotify that it can not dynamically index new folders.

For example you have a file system like

/home
     /user1
           /a
             /b

Then you run the inotifywait script, it will monitor actions on the ‘b’ folder.
If you were to then add a new folder ‘c’ under ‘a’ (same level as ‘b’), inotify will not monitor actions on this folder. Anyone got a way of remedying this?

Answer 1

Go up a level and monitor that with the recursive switch.

inotifywait -r -m -e create /home/user1/*

I don’t know what you are using this for, but for indefinite watching you might want to check out iwatch.