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linotify

A Lua binding for the Linux inotify library

Building

To build inotify.so, simply type make.

Usage

All of the constants are contained in the inotify table returned by require. Constants are named after their counterparts in the C header file (for example: inotify.IN_ACCESS).

The only function to be found in the inotify table is init, which returns an inotify handle.

init can optionally take a table a single argument. This table should contain attributes for the inotify handle's creation. The supported attributes are:

• blocking - If set to false, the I/O operations performed on this inotify handle are non-blocking. Otherwise, they are blocking.

Inotify handles have a variety of methods:

handle:read()

Reads events from the handle, returning a table. Each element of the table is itself a table, with the members of the inotify_event struct as its keys and values (except for len). If the handle is in non-blocking mode and no events are available, an empty table is returned. If an error occurs, nil, the error message, and errno are returned.

handle:events()

Returns an iterator that reads events from the handle, one at a time. Each value yielded from the iterator is a table with the members of the inotify_event struct as its keys and values (except for len). If an error occurs during reading, an error is thrown. If this method is run on a handle in non-blocking mode, it will yield events until no more events are available without blocking.

handle:close()

Closes the inotify event handle. This is done automatically on garbage collection.

handle:addwatch(path, [event_masks...])

Adds a watch on event_masks for the file located at path, returning a watch identifier on success, and the traditional nil, error, errno triplet on error. event_masks is a variadic sequence of integer constants, taken from inotify.IN_*.

All of the values in event_masks are OR'd together but this can also be done manually with bit.bor(). The following two examples are equivalent:

-- Event masks passed as arguments
local handle = inotify.init()
local wd = handle:addwatch('/tmp/foo/', inotify.IN_CREATE, inotify.IN_MOVE)

-- Event masks passed as a single, manually OR'd variable
local handle = inotify.init()
local options = bit.bor(inotify.IN_CREATE, inotify.IN_MOVE)
local wd = handle:addwatch('/tmp/foo/', options)

handle:rmwatch(watchid)

Removes the watch specified by watchid from the list of watches for this inotify handle. Returns true on success, and nil, error, errno on error.

handle:fileno()

Returns the integer file descriptor for the given handle. Useful when used in combination with an event loop.

handle:getfd()

Alias for handle:fileno().

Example

local inotify = require 'inotify'
local handle = inotify.init()

-- Watch for new files and renames
local wd = handle:addwatch('/home/rob/', inotify.IN_CREATE, inotify.IN_MOVE)

local events = handle:read()

for _, ev in ipairs(events) do
    print(ev.name .. ' was created or renamed')
end

-- Done automatically on close, I think, but kept to be thorough
handle:rmwatch(wd)

handle:close()

Example (Iterator)

local inotify = require 'inotify'
local handle = inotify.init()

-- Watch for new files and renames
local wd = handle:addwatch('/home/rob/', inotify.IN_CREATE, inotify.IN_MOVE)

for ev in handle:events() do
    print(ev.name .. ' was created or renamed')
end

-- Done automatically on close, I think, but kept to be thorough
handle:rmwatch(wd)

handle:close()

No More Global Table

As of version 0.3, the global inotify table has been completely removed. You now need to handle the return value from require, like so:

local inotify = require 'inotify'