Inotify itself is a kernel module accesible via calls from e.g. a C program.
https://linux.die.net/man/7/inotify
There is an application suite called inotify-tools, which contains:
inotifywait – wait for changes to files using inotify
http://linux.die.net/man/1/inotifywait
and
inotifywatch – gather filesystem access statistics using inotify
http://linux.die.net/man/1/inotifywatch
You can use inotify directly from command line, e.g. like this to continuously monitor for all changes under home directory (may generate lots of output):
inotifywait -r -m $HOME
And here is a script that monitors continuously and reacts to Apache log activity, copied from the man file of inotifywait:
#!/bin/sh
while inotifywait -e modify /var/log/messages; do
if tail -n1 /var/log/messages | grep httpd; then
kdialog --msgbox "Apache needs love!"
fi
done