Code Snips

Ok so lets look a that little issue with pyinotify, and it really is only little, but enough to keep you on your toes. So this is the issue in brief.

START LOOP 2009-05-11 21:55:39.733393
Result of notifier.check_events() = TRUE
Calling notifier.process_events()
<Event dir=False mask=0x20 maskname=IN_OPEN name=foo path=/tmp pathname=/tmp/foo wd=1 >
END LOOP 2009-05-11 21:55:40.339782
START LOOP 2009-05-11 21:55:40.339807
Result of notifier.check_events() = TRUE
Calling notifier.process_events()
<Event dir=False mask=0x4 maskname=IN_ATTRIB name=foo path=/tmp pathname=/tmp/foo wd=1 >
END LOOP 2009-05-11 21:55:40.340403
START LOOP 2009-05-11 21:55:40.340426
Result of notifier.check_events() = TRUE
Calling notifier.process_events()
<Event dir=False mask=0x8 maskname=IN_CLOSE_WRITE name=foo path=/tmp pathname=/tmp/foo wd=1 >
END LOOP 2009-05-11 21:55:40.340971

So here is the culprit notifier = pyinotify.Notifier(m, e(), 0, 0, 1000) (I’ve altered the timeout to accentuate the issue). Take a careful look at the timings between the event output lines and you can see that they are uneven. This is because the timeout isn’t a spacer, its just a wait and the events are not linearly spaced.

My error was my own of course. The lesson here is read the code through twice and check it more for design flaws.