Code Snips

A friend of mine posted a really good article over at blogspot about using pyinotify; after reading one of the comments there I started playing around with it. So if you want the original have a look at David Latham’s original post. I’ve simplified the code just a little to get to the essence of pyinotify. Incidentally if you’re working from Fedora like I am you might like to ‘yum install python-inotify*‘ and confirm that the module and documentation are installed. Here’s the base version.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import pyinotify

m = pyinotify.WatchManager()
notifier = pyinotify.Notifier(m, pyinotify.ProcessEvent())
m.add_watch('/tmp/', pyinotify.ALL_EVENTS, rec=True)

while True:

    try:
        notifier.process_events()
        if notifier.check_events():
            notifier.read_events()

    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        notifier.stop()
        break

It works really well for this example but has one generally unwelcome side effect. It also blocks on the ‘notifier.check_events()‘ call. A blocking call is not really what you want in an event loop so it doesn’t really work too well for the core of the application. However this is overcome very simply by adding the three extra parameters defining the wait timing of the ‘pyinotify.Notifier(m, pyinotify.ProcessEvent(), 0, 0, 10)‘. In this case the block is turned to a 10 second wait courtesy of the last parameter as shown in the next code snippet below. In an application event loop you would use a value of 0 meaning that the call would not block at all.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import pyinotify

m = pyinotify.WatchManager()
notifier = pyinotify.Notifier(m, pyinotify.ProcessEvent(), 0, 0, 10)
m.add_watch('/tmp/', pyinotify.ALL_EVENTS, rec=True)

while True:

    try:
        notifier.process_events()
        if notifier.check_events():
            notifier.read_events()

    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        notifier.stop()
        break

In this case the default event handler just prints XML formatted event lines to stdout. But there’s just one more unexpected side effect. You may find there are a few timing issues and how do you get the notification back to the main thread? But more on that later.