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.

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

Topics

Essentials

• Inotify/Inotify
• InotifyEvent
• InotifyEventMask

Errors

• InotifyError
• DirectoryResolverError

Low-Level Types

• RawInotifyEvent