From e226bed757fe3f3858c66489d7acbb1398add141 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Michael Kerrisk Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2014 10:00:58 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] inotify.7: Inotify doesn't work for remote and pseudo filesystems Reported-by: Eric W. Biederman Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk --- man7/inotify.7 | 13 +++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+) diff --git a/man7/inotify.7 b/man7/inotify.7 index 07c5a1ba3..266b797bd 100644 --- a/man7/inotify.7 +++ b/man7/inotify.7 @@ -617,6 +617,19 @@ way for a process that is monitoring events via inotify to distinguish events that it triggers itself from those that are triggered by other processes. +Inotify reports only events that a user-space program triggers through +the filesystem API. +As a result, it does not catch remote events that occur +on network filesystems. +(Applications must fall back to polling the filesystem +to catch such events.) +Furthermore, various pseudo-filesystems such as +.IR /proc , +.IR /sys , +and +.IR /dev/pts +are not monitorable with inotify. + The inotify API identifies affected files by filename. However, by the time an application processes an inotify event, the filename may already have been deleted or renamed.