The best solution I found so far is to increase the fs.inotify.max_user_instances in /etc/sysctl.conf by running this command: echo fs.inotify.max_user_instances=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p Source: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/8449#issuecomment-512275929
For Linux: Check current value of max_user_instances: $ cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances increase that value: $ echo 256 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances In order to make that change permanent you can always add a line to /etc/sysctl.conf: fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 256 If your system has a /etc/sysctl.d directory, you would rather put your custom settings in a separate … Read more
Documentation ( from Monitor file system activity with inotify ) The inotify C API inotify provides three system calls to build file system monitors of all kinds: inotify_init() creates an instance of the inotify subsystem in the kernel and returns a file descriptor on success and -1 on failure. Like other system calls, if inotify_init() … Read more
You’re running into a kernel limit with your inotify watchers. You can run this to fix it for the current boot, sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 You can run this to fix it for future boots, echo “fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288” \ | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
AFAIK the kernel isn’t storing the pathname, but the inode. Nevertheless, there are 540 bytes per Watch on a 32bit system. Double as much on 64bit. I know from Lsyncd (maybe you want to check that out?) people who have a million watches. It just eats a Gigabyte of memory.
inotify requires support from the kernel to work. When an application tracks a directory, it asks the kernel to inform it when those changes occur. When the change occurs, in addition to writing those changes to disk, the kernel also notifies the watching process. On a remote NFS machine, the change is not visible to … Read more
Oct 31 2022 update While my script below works fine as it is, Michael Sartain implemented a native executable that is much faster, along with additional functionality not present in my script (below). Worth checking out if you can spend a few seconds compiling it! I have also added contributed some PRs to align the … Read more
You may try entr tool to run arbitrary commands when files change. Example for files: $ ls -d * | entr sh -c ‘make && make test’ or: $ ls *.css *.html | entr reload-browser Firefox or print Changed! when file file.txt is saved: $ echo file.txt | entr echo Changed! For directories use -d, … Read more
I’ve done something similar using the inotifywait tool: #!/bin/bash while true; do inotifywait -e modify,create,delete -r /path/to/your/dir && \ <some command to execute when a file event is recorded> done This will setup recursive directory watches on the entire tree and allow you to execute a command when something changes. If you just want to … Read more
If you’re using .net, use FileSystemWatcher. More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filesystemwatcher.aspx If you’re using C, use FindFirstChangeNotification, FindNextChangeNotification, ReadDirectoryChangesW. More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365261(VS.85).aspx On OSX, the relevant api is the fsevents api. They’re all subtly different from one another, and they all have questionable reliability in edge cases. In general, you can’t depend on these apis … Read more