swift-inotify/Sources/Inotify/Inotify.docc/Inotify.md

Inotify

Monitor filesystem events on Linux using modern Swift concurrency.

Overview

The Inotify library wraps the Linux inotify API in a Swift-native interface built around actors and async sequences. You create an Inotify/Inotify actor, add watches for the paths you care about, and iterate over the Inotify/Inotify/events property to receive InotifyEvent values as they occur.

let inotify = try Inotify()
try inotify.addWatch(path: "/tmp/inbox", mask: [.create, .modify])

for await event in await inotify.events {
    print("\(event.mask) at \(event.path)")
}

Beyond single-directory watches, the library provides two higher-level methods for monitoring entire directory trees:

• Inotify/Inotify/addRecursiveWatch(forDirectory:mask:) installs watches on every existing subdirectory at setup time.
• Inotify/Inotify/addWatchWithAutomaticSubtreeWatching(forDirectory:mask:) does the same and automatically watches subdirectories that are created after setup.

You can also exclude certain file or directory names so that they are skipped during directory resolution and silently dropped from the event stream. See Inotify/Inotify/exclude(names:) and doc:WatchingDirectoryTrees for details.

All public types conform to Sendable, so they can be safely passed across concurrency boundaries.

Topics

Essentials

• Inotify/Inotify
• InotifyEvent
• InotifyEventMask

Articles

• doc:WatchingDirectoryTrees

Errors

• InotifyError
• DirectoryResolverError

Low-Level Types

• RawInotifyEvent