What is the proper way to use inotify?

Question

I want to use the inotify mechanism on Linux. I want my application to know when a file aaa was changed. Can you please provide me with a sample ho

Answer 1

Below is a snippet of how you can use inotify to watch "aaa". Note that I haven't tested this, I haven't even compiled it! You will need to add error checking to it.

Instead of using a blocking read you can also use poll/select on inotfd.

const char *filename = "aaa";
int inotfd = inotify_init();

int watch_desc = inotify_add_watch(inotfd, filename, IN_MODIFY);

size_t bufsiz = sizeof(struct inotify_event) + PATH_MAX + 1;
struct inotify_event* event = malloc(bufsiz);

/* wait for an event to occur */
read(inotfd, event, bufsiz);

/* process event struct here */