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libinotify-kqueue

Copyright (c) 2011-2014 Dmitry Matveev [email protected]

The purpose of this library is to provide inotify API on the *BSD family of operating systems. The library uses kqueue(2) to monitor the file system activity.

Requirements

• gcc, g++, automake, autoconf, libtool;
• NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD (all tested), Mac OS X (reported to work).

Downloading

This project does not have a special home page yet. The source code and the issue tracker are hosted on Github:

https://github.com/dmatveev/libinotify-kqueue

Building

Building from a git snaphost is as simple as:

$ autoreconf -fvi $ ./configure $ make

Testing

After you build the library, you can run tests to ensure that everything works in your system:

$ make test

There are 60+ tests, and since some events cann't be implemented using only userspace kqueue(2), this test will always fail:

In test "Open/close notifications": failed: receive IN_OPEN on cat failed: receive IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE on cat failed: receive IN_OPEN on ls failed: receive IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE on ls failed: receive IN_OPEN on modify failed: receive IN_CLOSE_WRITE on modify

Sometimes these cheks will also fail:

In test "Directory notifications": failed: receive IN_DELETE_SELF on removing a directory failed: receive IN_IGNORED on removing a directory

It is a known problem and it is going to be fixed. If you will get any other results, please feel free to report it at:

https://github.com/dmatveev/libinotify-kqueue/issues

Using

To use the library, all you need to do is to link your application with it (adding -linotify to LDFLAGS works in almost all cases). Of course, you will need to have include (-I) and linker (-L) directories to be properly set in your project.

Since the heart of the library is kqueue(2), the library has to keep many files open to provide proper monitoring. It is especially important when you monitor a single but large directory - EVERY file in this directory will be opened by a library. You can run out of file descriptors, so do not forget request more with setrlimit(2) before starting monitoring.

Note that fcntl(2) calls are not supported on descriptors returned by the library's inotify_init().

Status

The library is feature-complete, i.e. it implements and provides everything what can be implemented/provided using kqueue(2). The support of the remaining events (listed in the "Testing" section) will be added as soon as it will be possible to do with kqueue(2) (or using other tools in the userspace) in all major supported operating systems.

The other point is the performance, and the directory difference algorithm used in libinotify-kqueue can be optimized. It is the primary scope of the future work on the library.

Thanks

Thanks to Julio Merino for mentoring my work during the initial library development on Google Summer Of Code 2011.

Thanks to Antoine Jacoutot for support, reports, and the work on the related glib-kqueue project.

Thanks to bugreporters: Baptiste Daroussin, Stanislav Sedov, Dmitry Okunev, luoqi-git.

License

libinotify-kqueue is redistributed under the terms of MIT License. See file LICENSE for details.