panzi-inotify

Simple inotify bindings for Python.

I didn't like all the other available inotify bindings for one reason or anther. This one is different in these ways:

• You can import the module even if your libc doesn't support inotify. It then will have HAS_INOTIFY False and only if you try to create an instance of Inotify you will get an exception (OSError(ENOSYS)).
• It correctly handles paths that are invalid UTF-8 by using os.fsencode()/os.fsdecode() which use the 'surrogateescape' Unicode error handling option. This makes the file paths rountrip safe.
• wait() and read_events() is separate. You can do your own wait/poll logic if you want.
• You can use non-blocking mode and then read_events() only reads the available events. If there are none at the moment it returns an empty array.
• You can pass a stopfd to PollInotify(). This file descriptor will be added to the epoll_wait() call in PollInotify.wait(). If POLLIN signals for that then wait() will return False. This is meant for implementing a way to stop a thread that waits for events without a timeout.
• Translates errors to the appropriate Python exceptions from the given errno (FileNotFoundError, PermissionError etc. and OSError as fallback).
• Uses Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, so you can use it from proprietary code, yet it isn't as permissive as MIT or BSD.

Installation

Via pip:

$ pip install panzi-inotify

Form source:

$ git clone git@github.com:panzi/panzi-inotify.git
$ pip install ./panzi-inotify

Example

from panzi_inotify import Inotify, get_inotify_event_names

import sys

with Inotify() as inotify:
    for filename in sys.argv[1:]:
        inotify.add_watch(filename)

    for event in inotify:
        print(f'{event.full_path()}: {", ".join(get_inotify_event_names(event.mask))}')

See examples for more.

You can also run a basic command line too to listen for events on a set of paths like this:

python -m panzi_inotify [--mask=MASK] <path>...

For more on this see:

python -m panzi_inotify --help

See Also

inotify(7)